Military:

Bad weather preventing search for missing plane in Colombia

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

BOGOTA, Oct. 8 (Xinhua) -- Bad weather was blocking the search for a plane which went missing on Monday in the central Colombian province of Meta with 15 soldiers and three civilian crew members on board, the military said.

The air force and civil aviation authorities would resume the search early on Tuesday morning, the military said in a press release

The civilian plane, which went missing after taking off from an army base in the western city of Villavicencio on Monday afternoon, has been contracted by the Colombian army to transport troops and military goods.

The flight was carrying 15 soldiers and three civilian crew members to the rural outpost of Uribe, 150 km south of Bogota. The military has ruled out the possibility of a terrorist attack and said bad weather conditions in the mountainous areas could have been to blame.

The pilots radioed at 3:34 p.m. (2054 GMT) that they would be landing in Uribe on schedule, but the plane disappeared from radar screens soon afterwards, the civil aviation authorities said.