CARACAS, Venezuela, 18 August 2005 — Venezuelan investigators sifted for bodies and clues in the scattered remains of West Caribbean Airways flight 708 yesterday as France sent specialists to help identify victims of the crash that killed all 160 aboard.
The Colombian charter jet, carrying tourists home to the French Caribbean island of Martinique from Panama, crashed nose first early on Tuesday morning in western Venezuela after both its engines failed in one of the country’s worst air disasters.
Recovery workers have found the aircraft’s two black box flight data recorders, but they struggled to remove bodies mutilated or buried by impact of the MD-82 aircraft now scattered over a remote cattle farm, authorities said.
“We are still working ... they are using machinery to cut through metal, chain saws to cut through trees, whatever we can to take the remains out,” Col. Antonio Rivero, head of Venezuela’s Civil Protection Agency, told Reuters from the crash site.
“I can’t say how many bodies have been pulled out because what we are recovering are parts,” he said.
Rivero said more than 90 percent of the remains had been transported to morgues in Maracaibo where authorities will begin the difficult task of identification.
