The World - News from June 5, 1988

Ecuador’s top three air force commanders were among those killed when a light military plane slammed into a mountainside during a storm in Quito on Friday. All aboard were killed. The dead included Air Force Commander Gen. Angel Augusto Flores, as well as the second- and third-ranking commanders, Gen. Raul Counsin and Gen. Galo Coronel, and Israeli military attache Col. Shabtai Ben-Shoua, a military communique said. The remaining victims were six other Ecuadorean officers and a corporal. Experts theorized that the small craft, which took off from an air base on Ecuador’s east coast, was hit by lightning and set afire.