Piñera Declares National Mourning due to Plane Crash in Chile

Marines found a part of the Casa C-212 plane from FACH

Today the President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera decreed two days of national mourning (Monday and Tuesday) to express solidarity with the families of the 21 people who lost their lives in the plane crash that happened on Friday in Archipelago of Juan Fernandez.

“We are deploying all efforts humanly possible to find and rescue the people who past away in the accident last Friday, we’re working with the best technology to find the wreckage of the plane.We hope that this huge effort to fruition and we can find the bodies of the victims to return them to their families so they can have a Christian or a dignified burial and bring some peace to their enormous suffering and anguish,” Pinera said.

National Defence Minister, Andrés Allamand, is in coordinating the search in Juan Fernandez and denied the discovery of new bodies at the site of the tragedy. On Saturday the bodies of Erwin Núñez (officer of the Air Force), Galia Diaz (Officer of the National Council of Culture), Robert Bruce (National Television journalist) and Silvia Slier (National Television producer) were rescued from the sea.

Piñera said that in the planning the flight “all protocols and standards were followed and that the flight was executed according to plan. We do not know what caused the accident.”