TRENTO (Italy), Feb 4: Twenty people aboard a cable car in an Italian ski-resort were killed on Tuesday when a US military plane on a training flight cut a supporting cable, sending their gondola crashing 80 metres (260 feet) to the ground.Rescuers said the bodies of 11 men and nine women had been recovered from the wreckage of the cable car at the resort of Cavalese near Trento in the Dolomite mountains of northeastern Italy.
Operations to recover the bodies from the crumpled yellow cabin had continued after nightfall with the help of searchlights and cutting equipment. The roof of the cabin was removed completely to extract the mangled bodies.
Police said rescuers with helicopters had worked immediately after the accident to secure another gondola that had been left dangling by the accident and to ease it to the ground.
The jet aircraft, with four people aboard, cut the cables running down Mount Cermis at Cavalese but managed to recover altitude and did not crash, police said.
Early on Wednesdayprovincial police Chief Lorenzo Berardengo said all but one of the bodies had been identified. He said they comprised three Italians, two Austrians, two Poles, four Belgians, seven Germans and one Dutch national. The remaining body had yet to be identified for certain but was believed to be Belgian, he said.
The three Italians believed to include the car operator were all from the local region while the Poles were a mother and her 12-year-old son -- the two were identified by the woman's husband.
The bodies were so badly mutilated in the crash that identification was extremely difficult and in some cases impossible. Some relatives were obliged to identify victims by personal effects or the colours of their ski equipment.
He said 12 of the victims' families had yet to be contacted -- ruling out an early public identification of the dead.
Berardengo said though police and rescue workers were used to accident scenes, he pleaded: ``Please don't ask me any more questions. I can assure this was no walk inthe park.''
A US Air Force spokesman at the NATO airbase in Aviano confirmed that a Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler aircraft attached to NATO operations was involved in the incident.
The aircraft ``landed safely here after striking an object at 3:15 pm today,'' he said. No one aboard was injured and ``the aircraft sustained only minor damage,'' he added.
General Timothy A Peppe, commander at the Aviano airbase, suspended low-altitude flights by US military aircraft until the causes of the accident were determined.
The Italian Defence Ministry said Colonel Orfeo Durigon, an Air security expert and commander at the Aviano base, was Italy's representative on the commission set up by the US Air Force to investigate the accident.
In Washington, US Defence Secretary William Cohen expressed his ``deepest sympathy to the Government of Italy and to the families of those who have been killed.''
Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who returned from a visit to Estonia, spoke by telephone with US President Bill Clintonwho expressed his condolences and ensured that Italian authorities would be fully involved in the investigation into the tragedy, Prodi's office said.
Clinton promised such an accident would never be repeated, it added.
US Chief of staff General Henry Shelton told a Senate committee hearing that the US plane involved was on a training flight out of Aviano in Italy.
The US military acknowledged that the aircraft ``struck an object believed to be a gondola cable.''
It said in a statement that a military investigation of the incident would be launched. The EA-6B was one three temporarily assigned to Aviano to support air operations over Bosnia.
An Italian judicial source said a criminal investigation had also been opened into the incident.
A witness who lives near the scene said the aircraft had entered the valley at low altitude and had continued to descend until it suddenly increased height just as it was above his house.
``At the moment it corrected its flight, it made an enormous noise andthere was a sudden movement of air which rocked my car,'' he said.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
