Workers recover bodies, recorder
Emergency workers on Saturday recovered the flight-data recorder and the bodies of 19 people who died when their plane exploded on impact in a crash in a mountainous region outside Rio de Janeiro.
The LET 410 double-propeller plane owned by the local airline TEAM, which was carrying 17 passengers and two crew members, crashed Friday night in a remote area near Saquarema, some 60 miles east of Rio. The cause of the crash was not immediately known.
Authorities said that there could have been light rain and fog when the Czech-made plane crashed. The aircraft disappeared from radar about 20 minutes after leaving the city of Macae, 110 miles east of Rio de Janeiro.
“I heard a weird noise, and then a very loud noise, like a bomb exploding,” Jose Carlos da Costa, who lives near the crash site, told GloboNews.
Ankara, Turkey
Kurdish protesters ransack, set fires
Kurdish protesters attacked government offices and a bank while police fired shots and tear gas to scatter thousands of demonstrators Saturday in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated southeast.
Thousands of Kurds in the town of Kiziltepe tried to march to the local headquarters of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party to protest the deaths of eight people in five days in the southeast. One Kurdish demonstrator was fatally shot Saturday, said Nazmi Gur of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party.
Demonstrators threw stones and fire bombs, ransacked a tax office and set fire to a bank and the offices of the ruling party, according to local media reports.
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Police arrest 118 ‘sexual tourists’
Cracking down on visitors who come to Brazil for sex, police raided clubs known for using call girls and strippers, detaining 118 foreigners early Saturday to discourage what authorities called “sexual tourism.”
The tourists – mostly from Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and Norway – were briefly held in the northeastern city of Natal for not carrying passports or international identification cards that Brazil requires of all foreigners, police said. They were fined $76 and released.
Luiz Pereira, a federal police officer, said the country hoped the operation “will help discourage tourists who think sexual tourism is easy in Brazil.”
Prostitution is legal in Brazil, but people who promote sex tourism can be charged.