One of the black boxes of the Colombian West Caribbean Airways passenger airplane that crashed in Venezuela on Tuesday has been found, Venezuelan Interior Minister Jesse Chacon said.

"One of the two black boxes has been found as well as the transmitting equipment which allows rescue teams to locate the site," Chacon told a press conference.

Chacon said there were no survivors among the 160 passengers onboard the twin-engine airplane, including 152 French traveling from the Caribbean island of Martinique, and eight Colombian crew members, and that the victims are still to be identified.

Around 170 troops from the National Armed Forces (NAF), Civil Protection (CP), fire fighters and police are working at the crashsite in the Perija mountain range, near the Colombian border, in Venezuelan state of Zulia, the minister said.

Helicopters have begun to fly the bodies to the School of Medicine of the University of Zulia de Maracaibo, the state capital, about 130 kilometers southeast of the crash site.

Chacon said the airplane was on a charter flight and left Panama at 01:00 local time (06:00 GMT). Two hours later the crew reported technical problems in one of the two engines.

Maiquetia International Airport, near Caracas, received at 03:15 local time (07:15GMT) another message from the crew, reporting trouble with the other engine, he said.