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The 1973 crash site in southern Iceland has become a tourist destination
Two Chinese nationals have been found dead at the site of a 1973 plane crash in southern Iceland.
Police said the man and the woman, both in their early 20s, were found near the Sólheimasandur crash site.
A police spokesman told the BBC a post-mortem would take place early next week to establish the causes of death.
Officers had not found any signs of a “criminal act” by a third party, he said, adding that the bodies showed signs of hypothermia.
In 1973, a US military plane ran out of fuel and crash-landed on the beach at Sólheimasandur. No-one was killed.
The fuselage of the plane still rests at the site, and has become a tourist attraction.
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According to a police statement (in Icelandic), officers were first called to the scene on Thursday after people found a woman’s body off a footpath leading to the crashed plane. Officers found the man’s body a short distance away about two hours later.
A car thought to have been rented by the couple was found in the site’s car park. China’s embassy has been informed of their deaths, the statement said.
Jóhannes Thór Skúlason, head of the Icelandic Tourism Association, told Icelandic news site Ruv that his group worked with hotels and car rental agencies to warn tourists of bad weather.
“We have been lucky in the explosion of the tourism industry in recent years, although there are a few events of this kind that we have had to deal with,” he said.
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