Three Americans on board a small plane on a U.S.-backed counter-drug mission died on Saturday, after their aircraft crashed into a remote jungle area of northern Colombia.
Two other American passengers on the plane also suffered serious injuries, the Corvallis Gazette Times reported.
Twin-engine turboprop plane Havilland Dash 8 lost radio correspondence with the multinational task force located in Key West, Florida that organizes sanctions on drug-related infractions as it was flying over the western Caribbean. These planes usually follow speedboats smuggling cocaine from Colombia into Central America and the Caribbean. U.S. Southern Command spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Ron Flanders told the Gazette Times that he hadn't heard word on the details of the mission, except that the plane was sent out to find and keep watch on various drug trafficking paths in the coastal region of Central America. This mission was called Operation Martillo, Southcom said.
The Southcom official reported that the U.S. government contracted the use of the plane, but it was still unclear whether the Americans aboard all worked for the military.
The plane spiraled into the ground near Capurgana, a city located near the border of Panama. A group of Colombian soldiers took the two injured passengers to a hospital in the capital city, Bogota. Chief of Colombia's national office for disaster response Carlos Ivan Marquez reported that the wounded sustained serious injuries, including bone factures and burns. The names of the deceased and hurt passengers have not yet been disclosed.
Gen. Nicasio de Jesus Martinez, the commander of the group from Colombian army's Brigade IV who rescued the Americans from the scene of the crash said that the plane was not assaulted by locals.
"There was no aggression, no impact," Martinez told the Gazette Times. He also mentioned that the cause of the plane crash was not yet known, but could be attributed to faulty mechanics, weather conditions or human error.
Farmers nearby who witnessed the plane crash said that the aircraft hit the ground at around 1 a.m. in an agricultural area of municipality Acandi, according to Mayor Gabriel Jose Olivares.
The area is a mountainous jungle where rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are known to work with drug traffickers.
