10 tourists, 2 locals killed in Costa Rica plane crash

A small passenger plane crashed in Costa Rica on Sunday, killing all 12 people on board, most of whom were foreign tourists, a spokesman for the public security ministry said. The aircraft, a single-propeller Cessna 208 Caravan belonging to the Nature Air domestic airline, came down in a mountainous area near the Pacific coastal beach town of Punta Islita in the country’s Guanacaste peninsula, the spokesman, Carlos Hidalgo, said on his Facebook page. “It is a private plane with 10 foreign passengers and two local crew members,” a separate security ministry statement said. Hidalgo published images of the crash site, showing flaming wreckage strewn across the terrain. All the bodies were burned, Hidalgo told national television station Channel 7. “I have the deaths of the 12 occupants confirmed,” the head of Costa Rica’s civil aviation agency, Enio Cubillo, told La Nacion newspaper. The daily gave a list of passenger names, including five who shared the same last name, suggesting they were all related. It reported that the plane had apparently taken off from a small sealed airstrip in Punta Islita at 10.30am and crashed shortly afterwards for reasons yet to be determined.<br/>