Crashed Plane Found In Cambodia, No Survivors

Rescue teams found the wreckage of a plane carrying 22 people, including 13 Korean and three Czech tourists.

Rescue teams found the wreckage of a plane carrying 22 people, including 13 Korean and three Czech tourists, high on a jungle-clad Cambodian mountain on Wednesday. There were no survivors.

"You can see from pictures of the crashed plane that it would have been impossible for anybody to survive," Prime Minister Hun Sen, who oversaw the search and rescue operation, told a news conference.

Rescuers who spent two days battling heavy rain and low clouds in the search in the Phnom Damrei, or Elephant Mountains, 150 km (90 miles) southwest of Phnom Penh, had recovered the bodies of three men and four women, he said.

They were now working flat out to pull the other bodies out of the wreckage before taking them to Phnom Penh for identification and repatriation, he added.

"This is a large-scale operation. We are poor in wealth, but not in heart," Hun Sen said. "Our forces worked day and night looking for the plane."

After lengthy ground and air searches, helicopter crews spotted the wreckage of the Antonov AN-24 "sitting on the edge of the peak" on Wednesday morning, civil aviation safety chief Keo Sivorn said.

The crash had been caused by bad weather, not a technical fault, Hun Sen said, confirming speculation the 44-seat turboprop's Russian pilot had deviated from his flight path to avoid a monsoon storm cloud and flown into the mountain.

Rescuers had yet to retrieve the "black box" flight data recorder, Hun Sen said.

The plane, operated by Phnom Penh-based carrier PMT Air, vanished from radar screens on Monday during a flight from Siem Reap, home to the famed 800-year-old Angkor Wat temple complex, to the coastal resort of Sihanoukville.

Also on board were two Cambodian co-pilots, a Cambodian engineer and two flight attendants.

Air services between Siem Reap and Sihanoukville resumed in January after a prolonged hiatus during Cambodia's civil war.

The reopening of the route was touted as another sign of the former French colony's accelerating recovery from the destruction wrought by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge during their four years in power from 1975 to 1979.

Cambodia attracted more than 1.7 million tourists last year, most of them drawn to Angkor Wat.