Seven people have been killed after a helicopter carrying a safari party crashed in a remote part of northern Kenya. The disaster claimed the lives of everyone connected to the flight and ranks among the deadliest incidents to strike visitors to the country's wildlife areas in recent memory.
American citizens were among those who died. The broadcast reporting the crash said that five of the seven people killed were Americans, a sign that the group aboard the aircraft included foreign visitors who had traveled to Kenya for a safari.
Among the confirmed victims was a senior figure from American Spanish-language media. José Alberto Suárez, an executive with the Telemundo network, was named as one of those killed in the crash, a loss that has reverberated well beyond Kenya.
The news was met with grief across the media industry. Cesar Conde, the chairman of NBCUniversal, said that he and the company were heartbroken by the deaths, paying tribute to a colleague lost far from home.
The helicopter went down in a rugged and remote stretch of northern Kenya, an area distant from major towns and difficult to reach. The isolation of the location has added to the challenge facing those responding to the tragedy on the ground.
Helicopter flights are a common way for visitors to move across Kenya's vast conservancies and to take in its landscapes and wildlife from the air. On this occasion, what began as a safari outing ended in catastrophe, with none of those aboard surviving the crash.
Attention now turns to confirming the identities of all those killed and to establishing exactly what brought the aircraft down. For now, the toll stands at seven dead, a group that spanned continents, as families and colleagues begin to absorb the scale of the loss.