INDONESIA INVESTIGATES NUMBER OF PASSENGERS ON CRASHED PLANE
MEDAN, Indonesia (AP) — An air force transport plane that crashed in Indonesia carried more passengers than the military previously reported, raising the death toll to more than 140 on Wednesday combined with victims from the neighborhood where the aircraft went down in flames
The air force says 122 people
were on board, including military personnel and their families.
Officials don't expect any survivors from the plane.
Initially,
the air force said there were 12 crew members on the C-130 and did not
mention passengers. It then repeatedly raised the numbers of people
aboard, indicating lax controls and raising questions about whether the
plane was accepting paying passengers despite previous promises to crack
down on the practice.
Hitching
rides on military planes to reach remote destinations is common in
Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago that spans three time zones. The
plane had traveled from the capital, Jakarta, and stopped at two
locations before arriving at Medan on Sumatra, one of Indonesia's main
islands.
Air force chief Air
Marshal Agus Supriatna told reporters the Hercules was only authorized
to carry military personnel and their families. He said he would
investigate allegations of paying passengers. A copy of the manifest
seen by The Associated Press shows 32 passengers with no designation.
The rest are described as either military or military family members.
Dozens of family members
gathered at Medan's Adam Malik hospital on Wednesday. Outside its
mortuary, more than 100 wood coffins were arranged in rows and women
cried and screamed the names of loved ones killed in the disaster.
A
group of students from a Catholic high school in Medan screamed
hysterically as a body bag was opened, revealing the badly bruised
corpse of classmate Esther Lina Josephine, 17, clasping her 14-year-old
sister.
"She looks like she
wanted to protect her younger sister," said the school's principal,
Tarcisia Hermas. "We've lost kind and smart students who had so many
creative ideas."
Hermas said
the sisters were traveling during school vacation to see their parents
on the remote Natuna island chain, where the father of the teenagers is
stationed with the army.
Hospital spokeswoman Sairi M. Saragih said more than 60 bodies have been identified.
The crash of the aircraft, which had been in service since 1964, occurred only two minutes after it took off from Soewondo air force base in Medan, headed for Natuna. It plowed into a building that local media said contained shops and homes.
Witnesses said the plane was flying low and flames and smoke streamed from it before crashing. Supriatna, the air force chief, has said the pilot told the control tower that he needed to turn back because of engine trouble and the plane crashed while turning right to return to the airport.
At the crash site, a backhoe has been digging at the pile of smoldering concrete where the plane imploded. The tail still stands in the middle of the neighborhood. The impact shattered a large building and set vehicles alight as black smoke billowed across the area.
Indonesia has a patchy civil aviation safety record and its cash-strapped air force has suffered a series of accidents. Between 2007 and 2009, the European Union barred Indonesian airlines from flying to Europe because of safety worries.
The country's most recent civilian airline disaster was in December, when an AirAsia jet with 162 people on board crashed into the Java Sea en route from Surabaya to Singapore. There have been five fatal crashes involving air force planes since 2008, according to the Aviation Safety Network, which tracks aviation disasters.
President Joko
"Jokowi" Widodo said he ordered the defense minister and armed forces
commander to carry out a "fundamental overhaul" of the management of
military weaponry.
"We can no longer simply buy weapons, but should think to modernize our weapons systems" he told reporters in Depok, West Java.
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