A charter plane carrying 81 people, including players from a rising Brazilian soccer team headed for a championship match, has crashed en route to Medillin’s airport in Colombia, according to authorities.
Five passengers survived and the rest were killed, the Associated Press reported, citing Colombian police. It was uncertain whether that was a final count, however, as the figures had fluctuated during the night.
General José Acevedo, commander of Medellín police, confirmed to a Colombian radio station that 75 people had been killed and six others had been injured and rescued from the scene. One of the rescued passengers died on the way to the hospital, Acevedo said.
Medellin’s mayor, Federico Gutierrez, called it “a tragedy of huge proportions.”
Poor weather conditions made it initially difficult for rescue teams to access the crash site, but Alfredo Bocanegra, the head of Colombia’s aviation authority, told reporters at about 4 a.m. Tuesday that search efforts continued despite heavy rain.
“It is worth it to keep looking,” Bocanegra said in Spanish. “One single life is worth it.”
The aircraft was carrying members of the Chapecoense Real soccer team, based in southern Brazil, for the finals of the Copa Sudamerica against Atletico Nacional of Medellin. The first match was scheduled for Wednesday in Medellin, according to Colombia’s aviation authority, Aerocivil.
According to Aerocivil, there were 72 passengers and 9 crew aboard the flight from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where the team stopped over. Twenty-one journalists were also on board, the aviation authority reported.
The aircraft, a British Aerospace short-haul plane operated by a Bolivian charter company, went down near the town of La Unión, according to Colombian officials, about 53 miles from the Medellin airport.
The AP reported that the head of Colombia’s civil aviation agency it isn’t ruling out the possibility plane ran out of fuel before crashing. But for now, the main line of investigation is a possible electrical failure aboard the aircraft.
The club posted a brief statement on its Facebook page: “may God accompany our athletes, officials, journalists and other guests traveling with our delegation.” It said it would have no further comment until it had more details on the crash.
The club, from the town of Chapeco, was a kind of Cinderella team based in the small city of Chapeco which only joined Brazil’s first division in 2014. It defeated Argentina’s powerhouse San Lorenzo last week to make it into the two-game championship round.
Its ascent from the depths of Brazilian soccer was the talk of the South American football world.
“It is common for Brazilians to say that the country has 12 clubs with actual chances to win the national title at the start of every season,” wrote Plus55 of the Chapeco team this week. “A small club, however, is slowly breaking this logic and has a real shot at becoming 2016’s most successful Brazilian club at the international level.”
The team’s climb was not sudden, however. It started winning lesser championships in 2010, getting moved up the ranks of Brazilian soccer from the C division to the A division. It started playing with elite Brazilian teams in 2014, the article noted, “and has not been relegated since, another rare feat as novice teams are likely to head back” to the B division “in the blink of an eye.”
Chapecoense played its first international match in the Copa Sudamericana in 2015, and in 2016 managed to eliminate traditional powerhouses to make it to the finals.
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