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More than 100 bodies found at Indonesian crash site
All 234 aboard the plane believed dead
September 26, 1997
Web posted at: 12:34 p.m. EDT (1634 GMT)JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- More than 100 charred bodies were pulled from the wreckage of a plane crash in northeastern Sumatra as search crews combed a mountainside shrouded in smog from hundreds of Indonesian forest fires. Officials fear there are no survivors among the 234 on board.
The Indonesian Garuda Airlines A-300 Airbus careened into a deep ravine early Friday afternoon, carrying 222 passengers and 12 crew members.
With night falling, rescuers called off the search until morning. The airport was closed after the accident because of poor visibility, and there was no word on the crash cause.
The plane, which took off from Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, crashed about 15 minutes before it was due to land at Medan, a major commodities and trading center. The plane crashed about 20 miles (32 km) south of the airport.
Flight GA-152 lost contact with the Medan control tower about 1:30 p.m. Friday (0530 GMT/ 1:30 a.m. EDT), and went down near the village of Buah Nabar in the Sibolangit district south of Medan.
Terrain bars use of helicopters
Scenes from the crash site were stark, with body parts and thousands of pieces of smoldering debris scattered across the ground. Grim villagers lined up, several rows deep, to watch rescuers work.
"We have taken out more than 100 badly burned bodies from the wreckage," one official said. "There appear to be no survivors."
Most of those on board were believed to be Indonesians, but the plane also was carrying people from other countries, including the United States and Japan.
Rescuers said haze and the rugged terrain had prevented them from flying helicopters to the crash site. Witnesses said the 15-year-old twin-engine jetliner -- Flight GA-152 -- had been flying low in the haze, hit a tree and crashed in pieces down the 1,640-foot-deep (500-meter) ravine.
Authorities did not know what role, if any, the smog may have had. An airport official in Medan said a thick haze had covered the airport for the last two days.
"The weather conditions were OK for landing, but there was smoke haze around Medan at the time," Communications Minister Haryanto Danutirto said.
Some of the fires in Indonesia have been smoldering across Sumatra for months, and several airports in other cities on the island, and elsewhere in the country, also had been closed. In parts of Sumatra Thursday, visibility was down to less than 100 yards (meters).
Sumatra is an Indonesian island divided into two almost equal parts by the equator. The southeastern Asian country of Indonesia is an archipelago of about 17,500 islands.
Bush fires across Sumatra island and Kalimantan have sent a choking, health-threatening haze across neighboring Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. The smoke has drifted as far as the southern Philippines and parts of Thailand, including the resort area of Phuket.
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- At least 236 feared dead in Indonesian plane crash - September 26, 1997
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