Missing UK copter's wreckage found

WRECKAGE of a helicopter carrying a top businessman who was an honorary vice-president of Chelsea football club was found in woodland yesterday after it disappeared overnight, police said.

Phillip Carter, multimillionaire head of vocational training company Carter and Carter, is believed to have been travelling back with three or four other people from Chelsea's Champion's League semi-final with Liverpool at Anfield.

The twin-engine Squirrel helicopter took off from John Lennon Airport in Liverpool, north-west England, around 11pm yesterday, bound for Peterborough, north of London.

But it disappeared from radar screens nearly two hours later. The local Cambridgeshire police said they were called shortly before 1.45am amid reports that it had failed to land at a private residence in the village of Thornhaugh.

The helicopter's remains were reported to be intact, and the condition of its occupants was not immediately clear.

"They found the helicopter intact but we do not know anything about the people inside," Shirley Waller, whose son Jonathan was also on board the helicopter, told BBC News 24.

But she added: "I am thinking the worst."

AFP