Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm James Menendez. And later on in the program, we will be bringing you rather the latest on today's hostage releases from Gaza and the planned release of Palestinian prisoners. That's coming up in about 25 minutes.

But our top story today is that mid-air collision over Washington, D.C. late on Wednesday,

between an American Airlines flight coming in from Kansas and a military helicopter.

64 people were on board the passenger plane, three on the helicopter. The moment

the crash happened was recorded by air traffic control. And you can make out audible gasps

right after staff realized what had happened. America, 472, Washington, CWall, 1-0, 3-2-0-7.

Do you see that?

4-7-2. America, 31-3. Go around on some left in, 2. Do you see that? Four seven, seven.

America, 31, go around, some left in.

Two, five man, change, three thousand.

Jimmy Mazzae was next to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington when he noticed unusual

activity in the sky.

We looked up in the sky when we saw these white flare.

We didn't think much of it.

We thought they were like shooting stars. I don't know. I couldn't really explain it, but we didn't

really think much of it until we saw the fire trucks start going out to the tarmac and the

police cars and the police boats. Twenty-eight bodies have been recovered from the freezing

Potomac River so far. John Donnelly is the fire and emergency

medical services chief for the District of Columbia. Despite all those efforts, we are now at a point

where we are switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. At this point, we don't

believe there are any survivors from this accident.

And we have recovered 27 people from the plane and one from the helicopter.

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