Seven bodies were found on Saturday in the wreckage of a helicopter that had gone missing in a mountainous region in northern Italy two days ago, and none of its passengers survived, Italian emergency services said.
On Thursday, four Turkish citizens were traveling on the helicopter, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, while Italian media reports said two Lebanese were also on board.
“I offer my deepest condolences to their families and loved ones,” Lebanese President Michel Aoun said in a statement.
The helicopter pilot is an Italian from Venice, according to the Insa news agency, which reported that the passengers were on a business trip.
“After finding the remains of the plane that disappeared on June 9 on Monte Cosna, the bodies of seven people who were traveling in it were unfortunately found in the wreckage,” the Italian fire service announced on Twitter.
“No survivors found,” the Alpine Rescue Service added on Twitter.
In a statement issued Friday, before the wreckage of the plane was found, the Turkish Foreign Ministry confirmed that four Turks were on board the helicopter that disappeared after it left the city of Luka on Thursday.
The Italian Air Force, fire brigades and police participated in the search operations, but the helicopter had disappeared in a sparsely populated mountainous area, and bad weather hampered the first attempts to find it.
In a video posted on Twitter, an Italian Air Force spokesman said on Saturday that after confirming the wreckage through aerial surveillance, rescue teams had to walk to the site of the accident.
“We went to the site and found everything burned,” he added, confirming that the helicopter was inside a valley.
A spokesman for the Alpine rescue services told AFP on Friday that a similar search “is not easy, if a helicopter falls between trees, during this season the branches close on each other, and it becomes difficult to see from the air.”
The two Lebanese victims are businessmen Shadi Kreidi and Tariq Tayah, who were known for their work in a well-known Lebanese industrial company.
Kreidi, 47, was a father of four and a member of Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement.
“They were working on strengthening the Lebanese industry and providing it with everything new and advanced,” Aoun added.
As for Tayah (60 years), he was the father of three children whose mother was killed in the Beirut Port explosion on August 4, 2020, which killed more than two hundred people and destroyed large neighborhoods of the capital and resulted from storing huge quantities of dangerous materials without preventive measures.