Colombia peace deal approved
stadium in Chapeco, Brazil, on Wednesday died in a plane crash in Colombia.
agency said the time sequence of the tape was “inexact”, and had no comment on the content of the tape. But the agency’s air safety chief, Freddy Bonilla, confirmed that the plane was out of fuel at the moment of impact.
Bonilla said international rules required aircraft to maintain fuel in reserve when flying between airports, and the LAMIA plane had failed to do so.
The aircraft’s “black box” was recovered intact and in “perfect condition”, said Civil Aviation director Alfredo Bocanegra, who added that it would take investigators at least six months to reach a conclusion about the cause of the crash.
The crash killed most of Chapecoense’s squad and 20 journalists travelling with them to the finals of South America’s secondlargest club tournament.
The Brazilian club was on the way to crowning a fairytale year in the Copa Sudamericana against Medellin side Atletico Nacional.
The plane was scheduled to make a refuelling stop in Bogota, but skipped the Colombian capital and headed straight for here, reported Bolivian newspaper Pagina Siete, citing a representative of the airline.
“The pilot was the one who made the decision,” Gustavo Vargas of Bolivian charter company LAMIA said. “He thought the fuel would last.”
Bolivian civil aviation chief Cesar Varela said “the crew had their licences in order. Everything was in order”.
British and Brazilian investigators headed to Colombia to help with the probe, authorities said.
Hometown fans in the southern city of Chapeco, population 200,000, were in shock.
“Chapeco is not a big city. We would meet (the players) in the street,” said teacher Aline Fonseca, 21. “It’s hard to keep going,” she said. “The city is devastated.”
Fans gathered on Wednesday in the Chapecoense stadium, which was draped in black ribbons, and in Atletico Nacional’s stadium here at the time the match was to have been played.
Both stadiums were packed to capacity. AFP BOGOTA: Colombia’s Congress approved a revised peace accord with the country’s largest rebel group on Wednesday, a vote that was most likely the final hurdle in ratifying the troubled agreement whose earlier version had been rejected in a referendum this fall.
The Senate and House of Representatives, controlled by President Juan Manuel Santos’s governing coalition, voted overwhelmingly for the agreement. His chief rival and predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, said it was an attempt to replace a popular mandate.
Santos, who had staked his legacy on ending the conflict with the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, consulted his opponents after the referendum was defeated, but they said he had kept them in the dark since. It brings to a close one of the country’s biggest political dramas in decades. NYT