Photo: PRAKASH MATHEMA/AFP/Getty Images
For: The opinion Posted Jan 15, 2023, 8:39 am EST
Nepalese authorities raised the death toll to 68 after the accident of a plane that crashed this Sunday, January 15, with 72 people on board.
The aircraft, an ATR-72, crashed twenty minutes after taking off from Kathmandu at approximately 10:30 a.m. (4:45 GMT) while en route to the Pokhara district airport, a popular tourist hub in the country, some two hundred kilometers west of the Nepali capital.
“We have recovered 68 bodies from the crash site,” spokesman Prem Nath Thakur of Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport, which is part of the rescue operation, told EFE.
“The search for the remaining four continues,” he added.
With an estimated route of less than half an hour, the accident occurred when the plane was trying to land at its destination, Yeti Airlines spokesman Sudarshan Bartaula told EFE.
According to the Nepal Civil Aviation Authority, the passengers included 53 Nepalis, five Indian citizens, four Russians, one Irishman, one Australian, one Argentine, two Koreans, and one Frenchman. In addition, four crew members were on board.
Videos posted on social networks show columns of smoke coming out of the area where the incident took place and the remains of the burning plane.
The Nepalese government called an emergency meeting after the accident and constituted a five-member commission of inquiry under the direction of the civil aviation authority.
Nepal further declared a day of national mourning for the victims.
This is the second air accident in the country in less than a year, after a Tara Air company plane crashed in the town of Jomsom on May 29, killing all 22 passengers on board.
Nepal, with frequent air accidents, has been the target of repeated international sanctions for the lack of controls.
Since November 1960, when the country’s first plane crash occurred, more than 900 people have been killed in such accidents, according to statistics from Nepal’s civil aviation authority.
With information from Efe.
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