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Families arrive to mourn Venezuela air crash victims

Posted on: Friday, 19 August 2005, 09:50 CDT

By Patrick Markey

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Scores of shell-shocked relatives arrived in Venezuela on Friday to mourn victims of the West Caribbean Airways crash and reclaim the remains of loved ones lost in the country's worst air disaster.

More than one hundred family members filed off an early morning flight from Martinique to Maracaibo, where they were met by French medics and relief workers who prepared them to visit the morgue and attend a prayer ceremony.

Aviation experts are probing how the Colombian charter airliner carrying tourists home to the French Caribbean island from Panama plunged into a remote farm in western Venezuela on Tuesday after reporting failure in both engines. All 160 people on board were killed.

"This is a immense shock for France, and a terrible test for Martinique, an eternal loss for all the families," French minister for overseas territories Francois Baroin told reporters late Thursday in Maracaibo.

Most of the 152 passengers on the West Caribbean flight were Martinique government officials on vacation with their families. The dead included one baby and four children. The eight crew members were Colombian citizens.

The French government says a second plane will take off from Paris on Friday afternoon to bring hundreds more family members to Martinique and then onto Venezuela.

Recovery workers have pulled most bodies from the scattered remains of the MD-80 aircraft now strewn over muddy fields of the cattle farm near Venezuela's border with Colombia.

Authorities said on Thursday they had only identified three bodies and many corpses were mutilated by the impact. Recovery workers had taken more than 200 body bags from the crash site and were using dental records and DNA to identify bodies.

On Thursday, prosecutors in Martinique were preparing to open a manslaughter inquiry into the crash, a legal source said, with the agreement of the French Justice Minister.

Venezuelan civil aviation investigators are working with Colombian and French authorities to see if the flight data recorder, cockpit voice recorder and tests will establish how both the West Caribbean aircraft's engines could have failed.

"What is left is to extract the engines and parts of the aircraft ... to start reconstruction. We have asked Colombia for the pilot records and documents we need," said Lt. Col. Lorllys Ramos, head of the Venezuelan aviation investigation unit.

West Caribbean's safety and aircraft maintenance record has come under increasing scrutiny. Colombian authorities have suspended the airline's flights while they review its inspections.

The MD-82 airliner that crashed passed a Colombian safety check on Monday and cleared two inspections while on French territory. But West Caribbean has been fined before for safety violations.

A recent audit by Colombian authorities found a lack of crew training, incorrect use of flight logs and maintenance problems. It also said the airline failed to properly check routes or register flights and crew time, and that it exceeded permitted flight times.

Eight passengers and crew died in March when an aircraft belonging to West Caribbean, based in the Colombian city of Medellin, crashed after takeoff.

Experts say investigators will focus on the flight data recorder to pinpoint engine performance. Failure of one engine is not unusual but it is rare for both to fail. That could point to fuel starvation, fuel quality problems, maintenance or crew handling of the engines, they said.

Source: REUTERS

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