At least 66 people have died and dozens of others have been wounded after a Colombian military plane with 125 people on board crashed after takeoff in the south of the country, officials have said.
The Lockheed Martin-built C-130 Hercules aircraft went down on Monday shortly after it had departed from Puerto Leguizamo, near the southern border with Ecuador and Peru, strewing burning wreckage on the jungle floor.
Minister of Defence Pedro Sanchez said the plane hit the ground just 1.5km (0.9 miles) away from where it took off, leading to the detonation of ammunition and setting the aircraft ablaze. There was no indication of an “attack by illegal actors”, Sanchez said.
General Hugo Alejandro Lopez Barreto, the head of the Colombian armed forces, said four military personnel were missing.
“Sadly, as a consequence of this tragic accident, 66 of our military elements died,” he said.
“At the moment, we have no information or indications that it was an attack by an illegal armed group,” Barreto added.
In a video posted on social media, Deputy Mayor Carlos Claros said the victims’ bodies were taken to the small town’s morgue, and that the only two clinics in town treated the injured before they were flown to larger cities.
The updated death toll came shortly after Claros told RCN television that 33 people had died, and that efforts were being made to treat and evacuate dozens of others injured.
Carlos Fernando Silva, the commander of Colombia’s air force, said earlier that two planes, with 74 beds, had been sent to the area to fly the injured back to hospitals in the capital, Bogota, and elsewhere.
Colombia acquired its first C-130 Hercules in the late 1960s and has more recently modernised some older C-130s with newer models sent from the United States.
Last month, another C-130 belonging to the Bolivian air force crashed in the city of El Alto, barely missing a residential building. More than 20 people were killed in that crash and 30 were injured.