The New Nation - Internet Edition

AP, La Paz

A plane carrying more than 150 people crash-landed in a bog in eastern Bolivia on Friday after fierce storms turned it away from its destination and it tried to reach another airport hundreds of miles away, according to officials and news reports. All on board survived. Photographs by local media showed the charter Boeing 727, flown by a local airline, in a flooded forest clearing, stripped of at least one wing. A set of landing gear was in the water nearby. "We noticed the engines went out, and there was this calm," Paolo Bravo, a Bolivian senator who was on board, told the radio network Erbol. "Then they told us, 'Crash positions! Crash positions!' and it was just another two or three seconds before we hit," he said. "I think you could call it a belly flop," Bravo added. "The plane fell, the wings broke off, but the fuselage was OK." The plane took off from the Bolivian capital, La Paz, but severe storms forced it to turn away from its destination in the northern city of Cobija.