Italy: 7 bodies found at helicopter crash site

Italian rescuers on Saturday located the bodies of seven people killed in a helicopter crash, authorities said, two days after the aircraft disappeared from radar screens in a mountainous area.

"The rescuers have found dead the seven passengers from the helicopter, four of Turkish and two of Lebanese nationality, who were on a business trip to Italy. As well as the Italian pilot," the prefect's office in the city of Modena said in a statement.

The helicopter took off on Thursday morning from Lucca in Tuscany. It was heading towards the northern city of Treviso when it got caught up in a storm over a remote area before flight systems lost track of the chopper.

Runner tipoff helps locate crash site

Colonel Alfonso Cipriano, who heads the air force operation in charge of the search, said rescuers went to the crash site after a mountain runner reported seeing what he thought was a part of the helicopter during an excursion on Mount Cusna on Saturday morning.

Air crews confirmed the site and searchers initially found five corpses before later discovering two more, Cipriano told The Associated Press. The location was in a hard-to-reach, heavily forested valley.

The four Turkish businessmen who perished worked for Eczacibasi Consumer Products, a subsidiary of major Turkish industrial group Eczacibasi. The company said in a statement it was with "great pain and sadness" that its director of factories, director of hygienic papers at its Yalova province factory, director of investment projects and production director at its Manisa province factory had died and relayed their condolences.

The crash site was some 10 kilometers (six miles) from where rescuers initially began searching based on the passengers' last cell phone pings, which indicate a person's network location. Given the difficult terrain, Cipriano said it might have taken hours more, or even days, to find the helicopter had it not been for the runner's suggestion.

jsi/kb (AP, Reuters)