A
Lao Airlines plane carrying 44 people, including French and Thai
citizens, from the capital Vientiane to the southern town of Pakse
crashed killing all on board on Wednesday, officials said.
At
least seven French citizens and five Thais were among those killed when
the plane carrying 39 passengers and five crew went down around eight
kilometres (five miles) from the airport in Champasak province in
southern Laos, officials said.
French
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said he had learned of the deaths with
“deep shock and great sadness” and that France was rushing embassy
officials to the site of the crash.
Pakse is a hub for tourists travelling to more remote areas in southern Laos.
“I
can now confirm, according to our reports, that all 44 people on board
have died, including five Thai,” Thai foreign ministry spokesman Sek
Wannamethee told AFP.
Pictures
on Thai television showed a small plane, half submerged in the river,
with what appeared to be bodies lying on the banks.
An official at the South Korean embassy in Bangkok told Yonhap news agency that three South Koreans were also among the dead.
State-owned
Lao Airlines confirmed the crash in a statement on its official
Facebook page, in which it expressed “our condolences to family,
friends, colleagues and relatives” of the passengers.
It said the aircraft hit “extreme” bad weather and had crashed into the Mekong River.
“There were no news of survivors at this time,” it said, but did not confirm the number of deaths.
“Lao
Airlines is taking all necessary steps to coordinate and dispatch all
rescue units to the accident site in the hope of finding survivors and
at the same time informing relative of the passengers,” the English
language statement said.
The
QV301 flight set off from Vientiane on time at 2.45pm (0745 GMT) and
was supposed to arrive in Paske just over an hour later, but crashed as
it prepared to land.
A
spokesman from aircraft manufacturer ATR in France confirmed the crash
and told AFP that the state-owned Lao Airlines flight was one of its
twin-engine turboprop ATR-72 planes. He said Lao Airlines has a fleet of
six ATR-72 planes.
An official at the Vietnamese Embassy in Laos told AFP on condition of anonymity that all on board the plane had been killed.
Founded
in 1976, the carrier operates a fleet of ATR-72 turboprop, Airbus A320
and Chinese-made MA60 planes, serving domestic airports and destinations
in China, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, according to its website.
It has a chequered safety record.
The
country has had 29 fatal air accidents since the 1950s, according to
the Aviation Safety Network, whose data showed that the country’s safety
record has improved dramatically in the last decade.
The
last fatal air accident was in October 2000 when eight people died when
a plane operated by the airline — then called Lao Aviation — crashed in
remote mountains in the northeast of the country.
Communist
Laos, landlocked between Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and
China, is a closed country with a secretive one-party government.
The nation of about seven million people is one of Asia’s poorest countries and is highly dependent on foreign donors.
The
economy is relatively insulated from global trade and financial
networks, though Laos has become a popular tourism destination and
mining has played an increasingly important role in growth. [AFP]
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