Official period of mourning declared after Boeing 737 crashed outside Havana on Friday

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

More than 100 people were killed when a Boeing 737 crashed soon after taking off from Havana in what appeared to be Cuba’s worst air disaster in nearly 30 years, officials and state media have said.

The passenger plane, which was on a domestic flight to Holguín in eastern Cuba, crashed at 12.08pm (16:08 GMT) on Friday. There were 105 passengers, including five children, plus crew members, state media reported.

Five of the passengers and the crew were foreign, according to media reports. Two Argentine citizens and an unspecified number of Mexicans were among the dead, the Argentine and Mexican governments said.

Cuba declared an official period of mourning from 6am on Saturday to 12pm on Sunday, during which the flag would be flown at half-mast outside state and military institutions.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in broadcast comments that a high number of people appeared to have been killed. He said the fire from the crash had been extinguished and authorities were identifying bodies.

Díaz-Canel said authorities were investigating the cause of the crash.

Former Cuban president Raúl Castro, who now heads the country’s ruling Communist party, offered his condolences to the families of those who died in the crash as he recovered from a hernia operation, state media reported.

This was the first time Cuba reported on a health issue for Castro, 86, who last month handed over the reins of power to Díaz-Canel, his right-hand man.

Castro, “who is recovering satisfactorily from a recent planned surgery to get rid of a hernia, is staying up-to-date on the situation and has given the relevant guidance”, the Communist party newspaper Granma reported.

Blackened wreckage of the aircraft was strewn over the crash site near Santiago de las Vegas, 20km (12 miles) south of Havana.

“We heard an explosion and then saw a big cloud of smoke go up,” said Gilberto Menendez, who runs a restaurant near the crash site in the agricultural area of Boyeros.

The flight’s destination, Holguín, is the capital of a province popular with tourists for its pristine beaches.

Carlos Alberto Martinez, director of Havana’s Calixto Garcia hospital, told Reuters that four victims of the crash had been brought there and one died. Three others, all women, were in a serious condition, he said.

“She is alive but very burnt and swollen,” said one of the women’s relatives at the hospital.

The Mexican transport department said on its website: “During takeoff (the plane) apparently suffered a problem and dived to the ground.”

The Boeing 737-201 aircraft was built in 1979 and leased by Cuban airline Cubana from a small Mexican company called Damojh, according to the Mexican government.

Damojh in Mexico said it did not have any more information. Cubana declined to comment.

Mexico said it would send a team of investigators from its Directorate General of Civil Aeronautics on Saturday. Most aircraft accidents take months to investigate.

A US State Department official said the agency was not currently aware of any request for US assistance, but the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration had offered to assist in the investigation.

The State Department has spoken to the Cuban ambassador to offer condolences, the official said.

Boeing Co said in a statement that its technical team stood “ready to assist as permitted under US law and at the direction of the US National Transportation Safety Board and Cuban authorities”. The US has a decades-old trade embargo on the island.

The earliest Boeing 737s such as the one that crashed use engines made by Pratt & Whitney, part of US-based industrial group United Technologies.

On Thursday, Cuba’s first vice-president, Salvador Valdés Mesa, met Cubana bosses to discuss public complaints about its service, according to state-run media, including numerous cancellations of domestic flights this year and long delays.

Earlier this month the company was ordered to suspend flights of its six Russian-built AN-158 aircraft, most of which had reportedly already been grounded, according to state-run media.

The last fatal crash in Cuba was in 2017, the Aviation Safety Network said. It was a military flight and all eight people on board were killed. In 2010 a commercial Aero Caribbean plane crashed in central Cuba and all 68 people on board were killed.

In the worst Cubana disaster, a Soviet-made Ilyushin-62M passenger plane crashed near Havana in 1989, killing all 126 people on board.