By Ibon Villelabeitia
GUATEMALA CITY, Dec 21 (Reuters) - A Cubana airlines flight with 314 people on board skidded off the runway at the Guatemala City airport and into a neighbourhood on Tuesday, killing 26 people, officials said.
Oscar Bonilla, commander of Guatemala City Municipal Firefighters, told a news conference there were 26 people dead and 44 others hurt. The dead included eight Cuban crew members, nine passengers and nine Guatemala City residents, he added.
The French-owned DC-10, chartered by the Cuban national airline Cubana de Aviacion, slid into houses in the poor La Libertad neighbourhood after the pilot landed shortly after 10 a.m. (1600 GMT), said Luis Polanco, Cubana's representative in Guatemala.
A Reuters correspondent on the scene said the plane crushed five houses after it shot off the runway and down a grassy slope. The crash severed the cockpit and the first-class area from the rest of the plane.
The dead included a 12-year-old boy and two women, all three killed on the ground, said Jorge Villavicencio, director of Guatemala City's Roosevelt Hospital.
Peter Zimeri, director of Guatemala's Civil Aviation, said the crash was one of the worst aircraft accidents in Guatemala's history.
The plane was carrying 296 passengers and 18 crew members. Passengers included 276 Guatemalan students attending Cuba's Latin American Medical School and other Cuban universities, said Freddy Torres, Cuba's ambassador to Guatemala. At least one of the Guatemalan students died in the crash, said
Polanco.
Polanco also identified one of the victims as pilot Jorge Toledo, who had more than 35 years of flying experience. Radio reports had previously identified the dead pilot as Cecilio Hernandez.
Guatemala City's La Aurora international airport is at the edge of a plateau, with the La Libertad neighbourhood lying just below the level of the airport at the end of the runway.
Throughout the day, emergency workers pulled bloodied survivors from the wreckage as shocked neighbours wept nearby. Clothes and shoes from opened suitcases were scattered throughout the area.
One of the students on the plane, Carlos Flores, said the aircraft landed without any problem but then was unable to stop.
``We landed and then there was like a vacuum. The plane started to slide off and we fell into a small ravine,'' said Flores, the president of a student group from the Latin American Medical School.
And Julio Adan, a La Libertad resident who helped emergency workers, said he pulled three wounded girls from the plane.
``We knew something like this was going to happen sometime. It's something we are always thinking about: that a plane is going to fall on top of us,'' Adan told Reuters.
The neighbourhood, in fact, had been hit before. On April 28, 1995, a DC-8 cargo plane overshot the runway and smashed into a house in La Libertad, killing six people.
And in April 1993, a TACA Airlines Boeing 767 jet ran off a rain-slicked runway at the same airport and crashed into nearby houses, but there were no serious injuries.
Cubana de Aviacion began flying between Havana and Guatemala City in June with three weekly round-trip flights.
Cubana's last major accident was in August 1998, when 81 people in Ecuador were killed in a crash blamed on human error. In that accident, the Russian-made Tupolev 154M careened off the runway and exploded while attempting to take off from Quito.
00:11 12-22-99
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