Seventeen bodies have been found so far amid the wreckage of a tourist helicopter that crashed with 22 onboard on a visit to a volcano.
The helicopter with 19 tourists and three crew went missing shortly after takeoff on Saturday in Russia’s far-east Kamchatka region.
There are no survivors, the rescue team said late on Sunday.
Rescuers spotted the remains of the helicopter on Sunday morning in a hilly area.
“The wreckage of the previously missing helicopter was discovered from the air. It is located at an altitude of 900 metres near the place where it was last contacted,” Russia’s Emergencies Ministry wrote on Telegram.
The chopper took off close to the Vachkazhets volcano but did not arrive at its destination as scheduled.
Ivan Lemikhov, a ministry official, said: “At this moment we have already found 17 bodies.
“The rescuers have set up camp and the search has halted until daybreak.”
The helicopter was operated by a Kamchatka-based company called Vityaz-aero that organises flights for tourists.
The Kamchatka Peninsula, some 4,400 miles east of Moscow, had been hit by a cyclone over the weekend.
However, accidents involving planes and helicopters are very frequent in the far-east region, popular for adventure tourism due to its active volcanoes and pristine nature, where many areas are only accessible by aircraft.
In August 2021, a helicopter with 16 people on board including 13 tourists crashed into a lake in Kamchatka due to poor visibility, killing eight.
In July of that year, a plane crashed as it came in to land on the peninsula, with 22 passengers and six crew aboard, all of whom were killed.
