Plane carrying Brazilian football team crashes in Colombia, 75 feared dead

Fredy Builes / Reuters

BELGRADE - A plane carrying Brazil's Chapecoense football team has crashed in Colombia en route to the biggest match in the team's history, killing up to 75 of the 81 people on board. Three days of national mourning have been declared.

"This wasn't just a group of people who respected each other professionally. It was a family, a group of friends," club President Plínio David de Nes Filho, who was supposed to travel with the team before changing his plans, told an interviewer on Brazilian television.

"Everybody laughed so much, even in defeat… There was a great atmosphere, great joy. Yesterday morning, when I said goodbye to them, they said that they were going off to make our dreams come true. We shared this dream with all our emotion. And in the early hours of this morning, that dream came to an end," he said.

The team had been traveling...