The 69 members of Colombia’s security forces killed in a military plane crash were honored Friday in Bogota during a solemn religious ceremony that included photographs of the dead arranged before a church altar, the Associated Press reported. Survivors of the crash gathered in front of the images, including people seated in wheelchairs attended by nurses, others wearing bandages on their arms, and still others who walked with difficulty.
Gen. Hugo Alejandro López, commander of the Military Forces, addressed the gathering during the ceremony and said the crash had deeply affected the institution’s close-knit community. “We are deeply pained by what has happened, because when a soldier or a police officer falls, a part of our military family is broken,” López said, according to the AP.
During the service, a priest read aloud the names of the deceased one by one, according to the report. The ceremony included the priest’s statement that the service members had “offered their lives in service to the homeland.”
Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez also spoke at the event, offering condolences to families mourning the dead and assuring them they would receive full support from the institution, the AP said. Sánchez said that for some it would be “the last flight they would ever take in this world — one that would carry them toward the eternal flight,” while for those who survived, “it was, in a sense, being born again.”
The crash occurred on Monday when a Colombian Aerospace Force C-130 Hercules aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from Puerto Leguizamo, a town in the Colombian Amazon, according to the AP. The plane had 126 members of the security forces aboard, and 57 survived, the report said. The country observed three days of national mourning for what the AP described as one of the worst air disasters in recent memory.
Authorities are still investigating the cause of the accident, the AP reported. Officials said they have ruled out the possibility of an armed attack by illegal groups and are analyzing the condition of the aircraft, the runway and the crew.
The tragedy also reignited a debate in Colombia about the state of the country’s military aircraft fleet. President Gustavo Petro questioned why an aircraft described as “so old” was allowed to operate, noting that it was manufactured in 1983 and donated by the United States in 2020. Petro also emphasized the need to modernize the Hercules fleet, describing the tactical transport aircraft as capable of operating from rough, unpaved runways, the AP reported.