Mexico plane crash kills 6, including 2 lawmakers
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Six people, including two federal lawmakers, one mayor-elect and two aides, were killed on Friday when a Cesna light aircraft crashed at the airport of Bahias de Huatulco, a resort town in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca, Airports and Auxiliary Services (ASA) said on Friday.
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| Rescue workers stand around the debris of a crashed plane in Huatulco September 3, 2010. Two members of Mexico's Congress were among six people killed on Friday when their private plane crashed near the popular Mexican Pacific beach resort, officials said. Guillermo Zavaleta and Juan Huerta, members of President Felipe Calderon's National Action Party, or PAN, died in the crash in Huatulco in the state of Oaxaca, the state prosecutor's office said. The other three passengers, including a PAN mayor-elect and two aides, were killed along with the pilot. [Xinhua/AFP] |
The lawmakers were from the ruling National Action Party. The victims also included Huatulco's mayor-elect, two aides and the pilot, according to local media reports.
Oaxaca's Public Security Director Javier Rueda confirmed the six deaths, but the exact number of people onboard the plane remained unclear.
According to local daily newspaper "La Jornada," the plane took off from Toluca international airport in the central state of Mexico at 8:30 a.m. local time, with its passengers scheduled to attend a conference in Huatulco organized by a U.S. non-governmental organization.
Oaxaca's Prosecutor Maria de la Luz Candelaria said that the privately-owned light aircraft crashed at 11:30 a.m. local time ( 1630 GMT) when it was about to land in Huatulco.
Rescue teams rushed to the scene and found that the accident was probably caused by a failure in the plane's landing gear, as well as the poor weather conditions at the airport, as a tropical wave was affecting Oaxaca state.
But Rueda said the exact cause of the crash is still under investigation.
Meanwhile, Mexican President Felipe Calderon wrote in his Twitter micro-blog that he "deeply regrets the death of the deputies, of Juquila's mayor, the pilot and the other persons."
