Argentina.- Five people who stole an aircraft from a hangar in the Argentine province of Chaco died this Wednesday when the device crashed and caught fire, in which a weapon, money in Guaraníes and a cap from the Paraguayan club Cerro Porteño were found.
The Cessna 206 plane went down shortly after takeoff, 7 km from Villa Angela, the third city of Chaco, northeast of Argentina and bordering Paraguay.
“If it fell in the city it would be a tragedy,” prosecutor Sergio Ríos, in charge of the investigation, warned the local press.
A 9mm caliber pistol, money in Paraguayan currency and a Cerro Porteño cap were found at the scene, which makes investigators assume that the criminals could have that nationality.
“We have already communicated with the Civil Aviation Accident Investigation Board (JIAAC) and we have made a receipt of the scene, except for the extraction of the bodies,” the prosecutor clarified to Radio LT7 de Chaco.
The official warned that the identification of the bodies will be difficult because the plane caught fire when it fell.
The crew members “are not from here and I still cannot say why we are convinced that they are foreigners or foreigners, in any case it will be very difficult to identify each one because the bodies were completely burned,” added the prosecutor.
Two field workers saw the plane lose altitude, fall to the ground and catch fire, so they notified the police, reported the Norte de Chaco newspaper.
“They explained to me that the plane has a closing system that is hidden, and when they took off they forgot to open that ‘tap’ and they ran out of gasoline, not everyone knows where that fuel passage is,” the prosecutor said.
The Cessna 206 single-engine plane, with five seats, which was stolen from the hangar early Wednesday morning, belonged to a local agribusiness businessman who had recently bought it. The prosecutor estimated its cost at 1.55 million dollars.
A satellite telephone was also found in the device, which according to the prosecutor “is an element that allows one to think of a certain organization.”
The prosecutor said that the gang “had very important logistics,” since they managed to evade a series of “highly sophisticated” alarms to steal the aircraft.
Another similar robbery had occurred on December 25, 2022, in the middle of Christmas, when five people took an aircraft from a Resistencia flying club, the capital of Chaco, and then landed in Bolivia, the Chaco press recalled.
