BOGOTA — A small passenger plane crashed in northeast Colombia on Wednesday, killing all 15 people on board, including a local lawmaker, authorities said.The aircraft belonging to the state-owned airline Satena lost contact with air traffic control minutes after takeoff, Satena said in a statement.The Beechcraft 1900 twin-engined turboprop plane took off before noon from Cucuta, on the border with Venezuela, for a short flight to the town of Ocana, the carrier added.Satena did not say what caused the crash and said the plane’s emergency beacon had not been activated.Lawmaker Diogenes Quintero, 36, and members of his team were aboard the plane, as well as Carlos Salcedo, a candidate for Congress ahead of elections in March, according to a passenger list released by the airline.Images released by local media showed the crashed plane, including what appeared to be significant damage to the fuselage.The area where the plane crashed is a mountainous region planted with coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine, and where illegal armed groups such as the National Liberation Army and a dissident faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia operate.Officials from a nearby community notified authorities where the plane had gone down, prompting the deployment of a rescue team.Colombia’s Transportation Ministry later released a statement saying that “once the aircraft was located on site, authorities regrettably confirmed that there were no survivors.”Aerial tracking data indicates that the plane lost transmission while flying over a mountainous area between the municipalities of Ábrego and La Playa, a difficult to access area in the Norte de Santander province in northeast Colombia.Transport Minister María Fernanda Rojas confirmed that emergency protocols had been activated and that the Colombian Civil Aviation Authority launched an investigation into the loss of communication.Quintero, a member of the House of Representatives for Catatumbo, was a prominent human rights defender in the troubled border region with Venezuela, where he was from and where the accident occured. A lawyer by profession, he was elected in 2022 as one of 16 representatives in the lower chamber to represent the more than 9 million victims of Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict.His party, the U Party, expressed their remorse for his death and said he was “a leader committed to his region, with a firm vocation for service.””I am deeply saddened by these deaths. My heartfelt condolences to their families. May they rest in peace,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro wrote on X. — Agencies
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