Sixty-eight deaths were confirmed and four people were missing after a plane crashed Sunday in a ravine near an airport in Nepal.
Yeti Airlines Flight NYT691 crashed in a ravine near the resort town of Pokhara at about 10:50 a.m. local time, the Nepal Civil Aviation Authority said. Two helicopters and a ground rescue team were searching for the missing, the agency said.
“The incident was tragic,” Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal said. “The full force of the Nepali army, police has been deployed for rescue.”
Hundreds of people gathered at the site soon after the crash of the twin-engine plane. Sixty-eight passengers and a crew of four were aboard the plane, the agency said.
The flight from Kathmandu, 125 miles to the east, was scheduled to take about a half hour.Many family members gathered at Kathmandu airport, some exchanging heated words with officials as they waited for information.
The passenger list: 53 Nepalese, five Indian, four Russians, two Koreans and one person each from Argentina, Australia, Ireland and France.
Video from the scene posted on social media appears to show the plane starting to roll as it approached the ground. The plane was built by the French-Italian aerospace company ATR, which said it had been informed of an accident involving an ATR 72-500.
“Our first thoughts are with all the individuals affected by this,” the company said in a statement. “The ATR specialists are fully engaged to support both the investigation and the customer.”
In July 2014, a TransAsia ATR 72-500 flight crashed while trying to land on the scenic Penghu archipelago between Taiwan and China, killing 48 people onboard. An ATR 72-600 operated by the same Taiwanese airline crashed shortly after takeoff in Taipei in February 2015 after one of its engines failed and the second was shut down, apparently by mistake.
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The European Union has banned airlines from Nepal from flying into the 27-nation bloc since 2013, citing weak safety standards. In 2017, the International Civil Aviation Organization cited improvements in Nepal’s aviation sector, but the EU continues to demand administrative reforms.
An emergency meeting of the Nepal Council of Ministers was held at the prime minister’s official residence in Kathmandu. The government shut down all public services except for the emergency agencies, said Phadindra Mani Pokharel, spokesperson for the council.
Yeti Airlines postponed all of its flights through Monday “in mourning for the passengers who lost their lives.”
Sudarshan Bartaula, Yeti Airlines spokesperson, said the airline company decided to shut down all flights to mourn those who lost their lives to the air crash.
Contributing: The Associated Press