Weekly Report - 17 March 2016 (WR-16-11)

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has declared two days of national mourning following the deaths of 22 military personnel in an air crash early on 15 March. The occupants, which included 19 army paratroopers, two pilots and a mechanic, were on a parachute training exercise, according to an army statement, and the plane came down in the dense jungle area of Hacienda la Palmira, in the parish of Fátima, in the large eastern Amazonian province of Pastaza. A large rescue group comprising 100 soldiers and rescue crew took three hours to recover the bodies, which had to be stretchered out on foot. Ricardo Patiño, the newly appointed defence minister, went immediately to the area but was unable to see for himself the difficult-to-access site.

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