Rival clubs offer players to Chapecoense after plane crash

The aircraft reported electrical problems and declared an emergency minutes earlier as it neared its destination, according to Medellin airport officials. A charter plane carrying a Brazilian football team crashed after declaring an electrical failure, killing almost all aboard. Perfidious weather conditions hindered the rescue operation as ambulances struggled to reach the remote crash site.

Chapecoense player Alejandro Martinuccio, who didn’t travel with the squad, asked everyone to pray for his teammates and told Argentine radio: “I only survived because I was injured”.

Brazil’s president Michel Temer also tweeted to announce three days of mourning in the country. A poster celebrated, in a child’s handwriting, the team’s meteoric ascent into top-flight Brazilian soccer.

At daybreak, dozens of bodies were quickly collected into white bags while rescuers scavenged through pieces of the plane’s fuselage strewn across the muddy mountainside.

Chapecoense team members were on their way to play in the finals of South America’s second biggest club tournament at the time of the crash. “At this hard time our thoughts are with the victims, their families and friends”, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, it is a “very, very sad day for football”. In truth, we never expected this.

“And, of course, the Chapecoense club and all their fans”. There is nothing like this news. “It is very hard, a very great tragedy”. It still doesn’t seem real. “We will fight back when it’s time”, said Chape’s acting club president, Gelson Della Costa. It is hard. It is so hard to speak. Helio Herminto, Zampier Neto and passengers Rafael Correa Gobbato and Ximena Suarez were named by officials as having survived the crash.

Monday’s crash killed all but six of the people aboard, including most members of the Chapecoense soccer team from Brazil.

His son, Matheus Saroli, escaped because he didn’t make the flight, saying in a Facebook post that he couldn’t board “because I forgot my passport”.

The news hit Brazilian Toronto Raptors centre Lucas Nogueira with a ferocity he has seldom felt. The team is so modest that tournament organizers ruled that its 22,000-seat arena was too small to host the final match, which was moved to a stadium 300 miles (480 kilometers) to the north, in the city of Curitiba. “I don’t understand how they could do the flight nonstop with the fuel requirements that the regulations stipulate”. “It is a team that is really loved here in Brazil”.

Another fan says the team played “for the love of the shirt and not for money”, with a “commitment that only those who have lived here know”.

Flight 2933 was operated by South American carrier Lamia.

“The accident of our Chapecoense Soccer brothers will mark us for life and already leave an indelible mark in the Latin American and world football”.