Plane crash off Italian coast leaves 15 dead
Pakistan Times Monitoring Report

TUNIS (Tunisia): A Tunisian passenger plane carrying 39 people crash-landed in the Mediterranean Sea on Saturday while trying to make an emergency landing in Sicily because of engine trouble and 15 people were killed, officials said.

Palermo Prosecutor Piero Grasso said that 20 people survived and were being taken off rescue boats on stretchers at Palermo's port. Some survivors were clinging to the plane's wings when rescuers arrived, media reports said.

"Unfortunately, the toll has gone up," Grasso said. "There are 15 dead and 20 survivors."

Nine of the survivors were reported in serious condition. At least three crewmembers survived.

Grasso said the ATR-72 was forced to make a water landing about eight miles off Sicily because of a "technical problem" that was being investigated.

"We can rule out terrorism," Grasso said.

The plane left Bari, Italy, on its way to Djerba, Tunisia. It was operated by Tuninter, an affiliate of Tunisair, the national airline of Tunisia. Tuninter said it had no immediate word on victims.

"The plane had engine problems and was trying to (emergency) land in Palermo and had to land in the sea," Nicoletta Tommessile, a spokeswoman for Italy's air safety agency, ENAV said.

The plane contacted the Rome airport tower officials at 3:24 p.m. to report engine trouble and say it would have to land at Palermo's airport. Sixteen minutes later, the plane's crew told tower officials: "We're ditching in the sea," Tommessile said.

Palermo fire official Giovanni Saccone said when rescuers arrived, the plane was still floating in the sea. But hours later, the tail broke off and fire department divers were trying to keep the wreckage afloat.

Nine of the survivors were in serious condition, said Capt. Giuseppe Averna, an official with the sea division of Italy's border police. One of the survivors was a young girl, said Giuseppe Pumilia, an emergency room doctor at Palermo's Villa Sofia hospital, where five survivors were taken.

Three crewmembers were among the survivors at Palermo's Civic Hospital, officials said.

The Passengers

Tunisian officials said all the passengers were Italian, and SKY said most of them were from the Puglia region in the heel of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula.

The ATR-72 is a twin-propeller plane built in France. It has a two-person crew and seats up to 74 passengers. Its maiden flight was in 1988.

At least seven people have been killed and 24 injured in a plane crash off the Italian coast.

The Tunisian aircraft with 39 passengers on board made an emergency landing in the sea off Palermo in Sicily after reporting a technical fault.

The Tunisair plane was on its way from the southern Italian town of Bari to Tunisia when it crash-landed.

An earlier story from Rome said that a Tunis Air jet carrying 35 passengers went down in the sea off the Sicilian coast on Saturday, officials said.

All passengers aboard feared dead.

The jet left Bari and was on its way to Tunisia when it went down in the ocean off Sicily, Vito De Blasi, a Palermo airport tower official, reportedly said.

"It landed in the sea," he said.

Alberto Pellegrino, a spokesman for the air traffic safety agency ENAV, told TG24 television that rescuers were on their way to the craft, but the passengers' fate was unknown.●