Airliner carrying 72 people crashed in Nepal: No Survivors
A passenger plane carrying 72 people crashed near Kathmandu, Nepal on Sunday leaving no survivors, officials said. 69 bodies have been recovered so far.
The plane was trying to land at Pokhara International Airport from Kathmandu when the crash happened. The spokesperson for the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Prem Nath Thakur, said that the operators have retrieved black boxes from the aircraft to help understand the underlying cause of the accident.
The Nepalese government has declared a day of national mourning in honor of the victims. The travelers included 53 Nepalis, five Indians, four Russians, one Irishman, one Australian, one Argentine, two Koreans and one Frenchman.
Authorities have resumed their search efforts to recover the bodies of the three missing passengers from the crash. The bodies which have already been identified, have been given to their families and the bodies of foreign nationals will be sent to the capital.
This is the second plane crash in Nepal in less than a year. According to the statistics of the Nepal Civil Aviation Authority, over 900 people have been killed in such incidents since the country’s first airplane crash occurred in November 1960.
The European Union had banned the entry of Nepali airlines to its airspace due to access of safety controls in 2013.
