Actor Joe Lara

All seven passengers aboard a plane, including Tarzan actor Joe Lara and his diet guru wife, are presumed dead after it crashed in a lake near the US city of Nashville, authorities said. The small business jet crashed at around 11:00 am local time on Saturday, shortly after taking off from the Smyrna, Tennessee airport for Palm Beach, Florida, Rutherford County Fire & Rescue (RCFR) said on Facebook. The plane went down into Percy Priest Lake, about 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Nashville. The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed seven people had been aboard the plane, CNN reported. By Saturday night, operations had switched from search and rescue to recovery efforts, RCFR incident commander Captain Joshua Sanders told a press conference.

“We are no longer in an attempt to (look) for live victims at this point so we’re now recovering as much as we can from the crash site,” he said. On Sunday afternoon, RCFR said on Facebook that recovery operations had found “several components of the aircraft as well as human remains” in a debris field about half a mile wide.—AFP