B.C. man killed in Honduras plane crash

A British Columbia woman says her pilot brother was killed in a plane crash in Honduras on Saturday.

In a phone interview with The Canadian Press on Sunday, Jenna Forseth confirmed her brother Patrick was killed in the crash in the Roatan area, a popular island destination for tourists to the Central American country.

Earlier on Sunday, Global Affairs Canada confirmed a Canadian citizen had died in the crash, but did not identify them due to privacy concerns.

Stefano Maron said consular officials in the capital, Tegucigalpa, were in contact with local authorities and providing assistance to the victim’s family.

The Associated Press reports that the other victims of the crash were the plane’s four American passengers, citing an Armed Forces spokesman.

The Piper Cherokee Six plummeted into the Atlantic shortly after takeoff from Roatan en route to Trujillo, a port city on Honduras’s northern coast.

Jenna Forseth said her brother was “well-loved” in the area, saying “the whole town is in mourning.”

Maron added that Global Affairs’s thoughts are with the Canadian citizen’s friends and family.

The Honduran military said in a statement that rescue boats with police divers and firemen recovered four bodies within minutes of the crash, and transported another to a hospital, where he died shortly after of internal injuries.

The U.S. State Department also confirmed the deaths of four American citizens.

Honduran authorities also identified the pilot as Patrick Forseth, a Canadian national who developed tourism projects in the Trujillo Bay area.

Forseth was involved in a legal dispute with Afro-indigenous Hondurans who accused him of trying to develop their ancestral lands into vacation properties for international tourists. Forseth defended his company in a 2017 statement, saying it had purchased the land in 2013 and had made several attempts to reach an amicable resolution.

Files from The Associated Press were used in this report