Air disaster: Cuba helps families fly in

Press, 6 September 1989, Page 10

Air disaster: Cuba helps families fly in

NZPA-Reuter Rome Cuba is providing a plane to bring to the island relatives of Italian tourists killed in the Caribbean country’s worst air disaster. Cuban Embassy officials said the Cuban airliner would leave from Malpensa Airport near Milan to take the relatives to the disaster site. At least 139 people, most of them Italian tourists, died when the Cuban Airlines jet crashed in flames into a village close to Havana’s international airport. The Ilyushin 62M plane was on a flight to Milan. Grieving relatives rushed to Malpensa yesterday when they heard of the accident. Mario Peirano, the father of Marina Peirano, aged 35, who was on the flight, said his daughter had telephoned him from Havana. “She said she had lost the key to her car which is parked here at the airport and asked me if I

could bring the spare,” he said. Relatives of Pierluca Cighetti and Emanuela Casiraghi from Vimercate, near Milan, who were on the flight, said they had married a year ago but had waited until now before going on their honeymoon to Cuba. A plane carrying a crisis team assembled by the Italian Foreign Ministry left Rome’s Ciampino military airport for Cuba yesterday. The team will assist at the scene of the crash and help identify the bodies.

The Pope, the Italian President, Francesco Cossiga, and the Prime Minister, Guilio Andreotti, all sent condolence messages to the families of the crash victims.

The crash was the second big air disaster involving Italians this year. In February 144 people died, nearly all of them Italians, when a Boeing 707 crashed into a mountain in the Azores.