Antioquia: Seventy-one people were killed and six survived when a plane carrying a Brazilian Chapecoense football team crashed in the Colombian mountains near the city of Medellin, officials said Tuesday, lowering the initial death toll by four.
"Search and rescue operations found 71 victims and six survivors," Colombia`s disaster management agency, UNGRD, said in a statement.
The aircraft reported an emergency at about 10 PM local time and declared it had electrical failures. It reportedly went down about 50 kilometers from Medellin, Colombia's second largest city, in an area called Cerro Gordo.
The plane was carrying members of Chapecoense Real, a Brazilian football club that had risen from obscurity to play in the Copa Sudamericana finals on Wednesday against Atletico Nacional of Colombia.
Elkin Ospina, the mayor of the town of La Ceja near the crash site, said the mountainous terrain was some 3,300 metres above sea level and very difficult to access.
During the search operations, emergency workers found the black boxes with flight data and cockpit voice recordings from a plane that crashed.
Luis Perez Gutierrez, the governor for Antioquia department in northwestern Colombia, where the charter flight went down, announced yesterday that the two black boxes had been located. Aviation officials later confirmed the find.
Officials did not immediately say how long it would take to analyze their contents.
Brazil's President Michel Temer declared three days of mourning for the victims.
(With AFP inputs)
