ROME — A helicopter taking an injured skier to a hospital crashed against a mountain in central Italy on Tuesday, killing all six people on board, officials said. The accident was a further blow to an area struggling to emerge from many days of heavy snowfall, a series of earthquakes and an avalanche last week that killed at least 17 people, with 12 still missing.
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, though television images from the site, which showed that only the rear of the helicopter remained intact, were occasionally blurred by fog.
Gianluca Marrocchi, the mayor of the nearby town of Lucoli, told RAI state television that he had seen the helicopter and had wondered “why it was flying so low.”
The helicopter was taking the skier from Campo Felice, a ski resort in the Apennine Mountains, when it went down, according to the National Agency for Flight Safety, which has ordered an investigation. The agency sent a team to the site of the crash, noting in a statement that the area is difficult to reach because of “adverse meteorological conditions.”
News of the crash dealt a fresh blow to the Abruzzo region, where rescuers have been involved in countless operations over the last week after heavy snow and power cuts isolated many towns and an avalanche demolished a hotel after strong earthquakes last Wednesday. The death toll rose to 17 on Tuesday after the body of a woman was removed from the ruins of the hotel. Twelve people are still missing, while nine were rescued last week. Two of the people who died in the helicopter had searched for survivors at the hotel, a spokeswoman for the Civil Protection Agency said.
Rescuers continued to work at the Hotel Rigopiano, searching for survivors. Funerals were held for two of the victims on Tuesday.After hearing of the helicopter crash, Luciano D’Alfonso, president of the Abruzzo region, used his Twitter account to express his condolences to the families of the victims. He said he was praying “for the end of the sequence of tragic events that has struck Abruzzo.”
A spokesman for the Italian fire service, Luca Cari, said rescue operations had been carefully planned using diagrams of the hotel and taking into account the impact of the avalanche. “We are working on a hypothesis” of finding areas where people might have survived, he said. But even though rooms free of snow have been identified, “unfortunately there were no people in them,” he said.
“We are continuing to search, but we are not finding people alive,” he said.
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