Eleven killed as chopper crashes into Panama City building

0 Comments | AFP, May, 2008

PANAMA CITY (AFP) — At least eleven people including Chile's chief of police were killed Thursday when a helicopter crashed into a building and burst into flames in a busy Panama City neighborhood, officials said.

Justice Minister Daniel Delgado Diamante told AFP that in the crash "eleven people were killed ... six Chileans and five Panamanians," adding that one of 12 occupants, a Panamanian, had survived.

In Santiago, Chile's Interior Minister Edmundo Perez Yoma confirmed that the fatalities included the head of Chile's national police, Jose Alejandro Bernales, and his wife, as well as four other Chilean officials.

The dead Panamanians included four police officers, said officials who had yet to issue a final death toll as an investigation into the cause of...