Britons feared to be among Canada plane crash victims

Updated

The Foreign Office is "urgently working" with Canadian authorities to establish whether Britons are among six people who have died in a plane crash.

Five passengers and a pilot were killed when the Beaver seaplane they were travelling in crashed in woodland in the Les Bergeronnes area, in the Quebec province.

The plane, operated by Air Saguenay, took off from Lac Long in Tadoussac on a routine sightseeing flight before crashing on Sunday afternoon.

An Air Saguenay official told AP the flight was supposed to last 20 minutes and flying conditions at the time were "excellent".

Le Journal de Quebec reported that a distress call was heard from the plane before it crashed into a mountainside, 20km (12 miles) from Tadoussac where the tourists were staying, and the impact was so violent that nobody could have survived.

The newspaper named the pilot as Romain Desrosiers and one of the passengers as Emilie Delaitre, a French woman from the Cote d'Azur.

The newspaper said the four other passengers were British and may have rented a car with an Ontario number plate to drive to the Cote-Nord region.

Police said the bodies of all six people had been found, while investigators from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada were sent to the scene.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: "Following a plane crash in Les Bergeronnes, Canada, we are urgently working with local authorities to establish the identity of those on board."

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