'No survivors' in Venezuelan plane crash: officials

A twin-prop passenger plane slammed into a mountain face shortly after taking off from a popular tourist spot in Venezuela's rugged Andes region overnight, killing all 46 people on board, officials said Friday.

The ATR-42 aircraft, owned Santa Barabara Airlines, a Venezuelan company, was "practically pulverized" on impact, a rescue worker who flew over the crash site, fire services sergeant Jodi Paz, told Globovision television.

"It crashed at an altitude 12,000 feet against a wall of rock," he said, adding: "There are no survivors."

The plane went down 11 kilometers northeast of the airport in Merida, the main town in the Venezuelan Andes that each year attracts thousands of tourists from around the world.

It had been flying to the capital Caracas, 500 kilometers distant.

An official at the national civil aeronautical institute, General Ramon Vina, confirmed that, "by the type of impact, we presume that there are no survivors."

He said the rough terrain meant search and recovery teams had to be flown in by helicopter. But access to the crash site was only by foot, he added.

The civil protection director for Merida, Noel Marquez, told AFP by telephone that the plane went down near El Paramo, in the El Campanario region of the Andes.

Santa Barbara Airlines said the plane, of French-Italian construction, dated from the late 1980s.

It was carrying three crew members and 43 passengers at the time of the accident, according to the Aviation Safety Network, an online service that tracks plane accidents worldwide.

The airline, founded in the Venezuelan city of Maraciabo in 1995, had no record of accidents prior to the crash.

It serves both domestic and international routes, flying to Madrid, Miami, Aruba and Tenerife.