Salvage teams work in cold at plane-crash site
MERIDA, Venezuela — Investigators searched through the wreckage of a plane that slammed into an Andean mountainside with 46 aboard, working in freezing temperatures Saturday to find clues and recover victims’ remains.
Sixteen specialists were dropped off by helicopter near the crash site on the steep, foggy slope at an altitude of 13,500 feet, said Gen. Ramon Vinas, head of the civil aviation authority.
Searchers recovered the plane’s two “black boxes” — cockpit voice and data recorders that could indicate what went wrong. Investigators say the pilot made no distress call before the crash.
Officials said the victims were mostly Venezuelans but included five Colombians and a U.S. citizen, Vivian Guarch, 53, who worked for a Miami bank.
Iran’s president calls on U.S. to apologize
TEHRAN — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on the U.S. and its allies Saturday to “apologize” for accusing Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, a day after the U.N. nuclear watchdog released its latest report on Iran.
Ahmadinejad said the International Atomic Energy Agency report vindicated Iran and warned that Iran would take unspecified “decisive reciprocal measures” against any country that imposed additional sanctions against it.
The IAEA report said many past questions about Iran’s nuclear program had been resolved, but it highlighted Tehran’s continued refusal to halt uranium enrichment.
Ahmadinejad said in a televised address that the best way for the U.S. and its allies to “compensate for their mistakes” is to “apologize and pay compensation.”
Man who put king’s brother on Facebook sent to prison
PARIS — A 26-year-old engineer has been sentenced to three years in prison for creating a fake profile of the younger brother of Moroccan King Mohammed VI on the popular Internet networking site Facebook.
A court in Casablanca, Morocco, convicted Fouad Mourtada on Friday of “usurping the identity of HRH Prince Moulay Rachid” and faking computer documents, the official MAP news agency reported. He was also fined $1,300.
No one injured when bomb explodes
BILBAO, Spain — A bomb the size of a shoe box exploded next to a television re- transmitter outside the northern port city of Bilbao on Saturday after a telephone warning in the name of Basque separatist group ETA, Spain’s interior minister said. No injuries were reported.
The device had a booby trap attached to it, leading investigators to believe that it was intended to injure bomb squad officers arriving at the scene to deactivate it, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.
The Associated Press
