The company that owns a $2 million charter plane that went missing on Thursday during a flight over Peru’s famous Nazca lines believe it was robbed by drug traffickers, daily El Comercio reported.
“It is 99 percent likely that the disappearance of the plane is a hijacking and behind it [are drug traffickers],” representative Jorge Beleván of the Aerodiana company was quoted as saying.
The company has said it is unlikely the plane was robbed to be resold on the black market. “It is impossible to traffic pieces of a plane.”
According to a timeline published by El Comercio, seven passengers, along with pilot Francisco Curto and co-pilot Jorge Ríos, bordered the plane at 7:10 a.m. on Thursday for a fly over of the Nazca lines.
Aerodiana’s last contact with the plane was at 7:47 a.m. when Curto, who has about 15 years of experience flying over the Nazca lines, informed the company that they had finished the fly over and were planning to return.
About an hour after the company reported the Cessna plane missing, police confirmed at 10:30 a.m. that the passengers had presented false identification in order to board the plane.
More than two hours later, police detected the pilot’s cell phone signal in southern Peru’s Puno region, which borders Bolivia.
Planes used to fly over the Nazca lines have been hijacked before, according to the president of Nazca’s Aerial Transportation association, Carlos Palacín.
“From what I remember, there have been 10 hijackings in the last 20 years,” Palacín was reported as saying. “They have taken airplanes to Colombia and Brazil… They are mafias that sell the planes to drug traffickers because [the later] can’t go to a store and buy one… One of the hijackers needs to be a pilot.”
Peru is the world’s second largest producer of cocaine. To its North-East is the world’s top producer, Colombia, and Bolivia, the third biggest producer, borders its South.
The Nazca lines are one of Peru’s most popular attractions. Tourist planes routinely fly over the ancient geoglyphs, which are miles long and depict living creatures like monkeys, llamas, hummingbirds and spiders. UNESCO says the lines were created between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500, and are among the world’s greatest archaeological enigmas.
