Specialist mountain rescue teams from the Ecuadorian and Colombian Red Cross Societies reached the site of the plane crash on the Cumbal volcano, to recover bodies from the wreckage. (p7388).
Santiago Durango, Ecuadorian Red Cross , in Nariño, Colombia
Specialist mountain rescue teams from the Ecuadorian and Colombian Red Cross Societies have reached the site on the Cumbal volcano, just north of the border with Colombia, where an Ecuadorian airliner crashed on Monday, killing all 92 people on board.
The Red Cross rescuers found wreckage and debris from the crash over a wide area but only eight bodies intact; there were no survivors.
The Red Cross teams battled high winds, intense cold and fog to set up camp in a rugged area on the slopes of the 4800-metre-high volcano in Colombia's Nariño department.
They said the plane - a Boeing 727-100 of Ecuador's state-run TAME airline - had crashed into a rock face near the summit of the volcano. It was carrying 83 passengers, seven crew and two engineers.
There is no indication yet of what caused the accident, but a search is underway for the flight recorders.
The Red Cross teams, who are working with rescuers from the Colombian fire brigade, spent more than four hours in the open at the crash site, but had to briefly suspend operations because of bad weather. They were transferring the bodies of the victims to the Colombian city of Ipiales.
The rescue effort has been complicated both by extreme weather conditions and by the civil conflict in that part of Colombia.
The Boeing 727 had taken off from Ecuador's capital Quito for the border town of Tulcan, from where it was due to fly on to the Colombian city of Cali. More than 40 of the passengers were said to be Colombian. Air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane after the pilots requested permission to land at Tulcan.
Another TAME Boeing 727 crashed in Colombia in 1998 on a mountain near Bogota, killing all 53 people on board. Earlier this month, a twin-engine propeller plane belonging to the Ecuadoran oil company Petroecuador crashed in Colombia, killing 26 people on board; it was six days before search teams could find the wreckage.