Italian authorities announced today, Saturday, that rescue teams have found the bodies of seven people killed in a helicopter crash, two days after it disappeared from radar screens.
The governor's office in Modena said in a statement, "The rescuers found the bodies of the seven helicopter passengers, 4 Turks and two Lebanese who were on a business trip to Italy, in addition to the Italian pilot."
The statement indicated that the helicopter was found in a mountainous area on the border between Tuscany and the Emilia-Romagna region.
"We got the coordinates, went to the site and found everything on fire. The helicopter is mainly in a valley, near a stream," said one of the rescuers.
For its part, the Italian National Aviation Safety Agency opened an investigation into the helicopter crash.
On Thursday, the helicopter took off from Lucca, in Tuscany, bound for the northern Italian city of Treviso, and then disappeared after the wooded area experienced bad weather.
The Turkish industrial company, Ikzacibashi, said in a statement that the four Turks are businessmen who were working for it, and they were attending an exhibition in Italy.
Yesterday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said that 4 Turks were on board the helicopter.
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.