Andes crash site draws victims’ kin and looters

Associated Press

CUMBAL, Colombia – Army troops warded off looters who trekked Wednesday to the site where an Ecuadorean Boeing 727-100 crashed into a remote volcano in the Colombian Andes and tried to hold back grieving relatives of the 92 people killed in the crash.

The airliner broke into pieces, most no more than 5 feet long, when it slammed into the fog-covered mountainside Monday and exploded. Authorities said there were no survivors, and few bodies have been found intact.

Family members began arriving at a base camp used by rescuers and investigators near 15,721-foot Nevado del Cumbal, but a cordon of troops tried to prevent them from making the three- to four-hour hike over slippery paths to the wreckage of the Ecuadorean TAME airliner.

Other soldiers at a checkpoint stopped everyone who descended the mountain who was not a rescuer and searched them for looted goods.

There was also evidence of looting at the wreckage.

“There are suitcases and personal effects in the area, but you can tell that someone has been through them,” said Luis Eduardo Eraso, a firefighter.

Some family members, desperate to visit the spot where their loved ones perished, got past soldiers and tried to scale the windy volcano.

“We’re going up to see if we can retrieve the body, or at least a part of the body. Maybe a document,” said Orlando Pineres, a Colombian whose brother-in-law, Jose Medina of Mexico, was on the flight.

Authorities said the Ecuadorean airliner may have been off course in the fog as it approached Tulcan, a town on Ecuador’s border with Colombia that was the flight’s first destination. It originated in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, and was then to have continued on to Cali, Colombia.

With helicopters still unable to reach the wreckage because of cloud cover and steep terrain, officials said the remains of the dead would have to be carried down by people and on horseback. By Wednesday afternoon, parts of at least a half-dozen bodies had been carried down in bags.