At least six passengers of a plane went missing and are feared dead, said Costa Rican authorities after a small plane crashed into the Caribbean just off the country’s eastern coast. Reports suggest that all five passengers are believed to be German and the pilot to be Swiss.
Furthermore, local authorities have also found debris from the small twin-engine turboprop aircraft in the water on Saturday after the plane went missing on Friday.
Costa Rica’s assistant security minister, Martín Arias, said “28 kilometres from the Limon airport, in the Caribbean Sea, the wreckage was located, which apparently indicates that it is the aircraft. At the moment we have not located any bodies or people alive”.
According to media reports among the six passengers was German entrepreneur Rainer Schaller, along with his partner and children. Schaller is the CEO and founder of the gym chain McFitand reportedly owns 200 locations in Germany and hundreds of others in countries like Austria, Italy, Poland and Spain with at least 1.4 million members.
“Around six in the afternoon we received an alert about a flight coming from Mexico to the Limon airport, carrying five German passengers,” said Security Minister Jorge Torres. He added that while the search began immediately it had to temporarily be called off due to bad weather.
The German CEO made headlines in 2010 when an event organised by him in Berlin led to the death of at least 21 people and injured more than 500. The authorities at the time had blamed Schaller’s security and their inability to stop the flow of people to the Berlin Love Parade techno festival ground. However, he fought back those accusations by saying that the security was approved by the city officials.
(With inputs from agencies)
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