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Plane crashes in Peruvian desert, 7 dead

26 February 2010 02:34 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Officials say at least seven people were killed when a small plane carrying tourists over Peru’s famed Nazca lines crashed into the desert, APA reports citing ABC.

Peru’s state news agency says three Chileans and four Peruvians were on the plane.
One of them was a child.

Police say the accident happened at 11:30am (local time) on Thursday near the ancient geoglyphs, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Peru.

This is the latest mishap in a string of incidents for the country’s tourism industry.

Several tourist planes that fly over the Nazca lines have crashed in recent years, most recently in 2008 when five French tourists were killed.

Floods also racked the town next to the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in January, stranding thousands of visitors and destroying a train line that carries tourists high into the Andes.

The Nazca drawings, designed between 200AD and 700AD, are so large that they are best seen from the air and are difficult to appreciate from the ground.

The UNESCO World Heritage Site includes dozens of drawings of spiders, monkeys, fish and llamas that stretch hundreds of feet across.