DETROIT -- An agent assigned to the Detroit office of the Drug Enforcement Administration was among nine people, six of them Americans, killed in a plane crash in the Peruvian Andes, a DEA official said Monday.
Rick Finley, 36, was on temporary assignment with Operation Snowcap, a cooperative program between the DEA and the governments of Peru and Bolivia to find and destroy cocaine laboratories in those countries.
William Koonce, director of the Detroit DEA office, said Finley, a native of Batesville, Ark., had been with the Detroit unit for five years. Before that, he spent nine years on the Little Rock, Ark., Police Department.
Finley, who was single, is survived by his parents and a sister, all living in Batesville.
The other U.S. citizens aboard the craft were identified as pilots Capt. John Knapp, Dennis Islep and Billy MacDonald, mechanic John Van Zandt, and Clyde Bayless, an employee of the U.S. Embassy.
The other men were Peruvians identified as Mario Matallana, Hugo Samanez Castaneda and Raul Quintana Orihuela.
A farmer who witnessed the crash said an engine on the twin-engine Cessna shut down shortly before the crash, but Koonce said that has not been confirmed. Investigators were at the site Monday, he said.
Air traffic controllers in the Peruvian city of Huanuco said they lost radio contact with the plane at 5:10 p.m. Saturday, minutes after receiving an emergency call from the craft.
The plane took off from the Amazonian town of Tingo Mario and was en route to Lima. It was on a routine reconnaissance flight over the coca-leaf producing region of Upper Huallaga Valley, authorities said.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Lima said the Cessna, operated by the National Police, was found Sunday in a rugged region along the western Andes near the area of Pacaraos in Chancay province, 65 miles northeast of Lima.
