Colombia searching Amazon for missing plane crash passengers

An intense rescue effort was underway Tuesday to find six passengers, including four children, who have disappeared since the small plane they were traveling in crashed in the Amazon, Colombia’s aviation authority said.

The airplane disappeared from radars on May 1 during a journey over the Amazon rainforest in the southern Caqueta department, the Civil Aviation authority said in a statement.

Rescuers found one dead body “inside the aircraft” on Monday but the “six other passengers, including four children, were not found in the airplane nor the surrounding area,” the statement added.

Avianline Charter, the company that operated the commercial flight, confirmed the dead body was of the pilot.

The army published photos on Twitter of the plane wedged vertically into thick vegetation with its nose crushed into the ground.

The airplane had left from a jungle location on May 1 heading for San Jose del Guaviare, one of the main cities in Colombia’s Amazon rainforest, when it disappeared from radars.

Authorities have yet to determine the reasons for the crash but rescuers have already spent hundreds of hours searching for the missing passengers.

Soldiers and Indigenous communities living close to the crash site have found personal belongings and even a partly eaten apple, leading to the belief that there must have been survivors walking somewhere in the remote jungle area.