Ecuador’s 3 Top Military Commanders, 8 Others Die in Plane Crash
QUITO, Ecuador — A light military plane slammed into a Quito mountainside during a storm Friday, killing all 11 people aboard, including Ecuador’s top three commanders and an Israeli military attache, a military communique said Saturday.
Experts theorized that the small craft, an FAE-086, which took off from an air base on Ecuador’s east coast, was hit by lightning and set afire. It then crashed into a mountainside and broke in two.
Technicians were searching on Saturday for the flight recorder.
The dead included Air Force Commander Gen. Angel Augusto Flores, and the second and third ranking commanders, Gen. Raul Counsin and Gen. Galo Coronel, and Israeli military attache Col. Shabtai Ben-Shoua. The other Ecuadoran victims were six other officers and a corporal.
An army spokesman in Jerusalem said Ben-Shoua, aged 42 and born in Italy, enlisted in the Israeli air force in 1964 and participated in many military operations as a navigator on F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers.
Israel has sold Kfir warplanes to Ecuador.
Ecuadoran President Leon Febres Cordero, who returned to Quito on Saturday from an official visit in Guayaquil, declared three days of mourning.
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