Photo of Panama Crash victims, Michael and Talia Klein

Panama City, Panama (AP), December 25, 2007 – The bodies of a California businessman, his teenage daughter and the Panamanian pilot of a plane that crashed over the weekend were found Tuesday in Panama’s mountains, officials said. A 12-year-old American girl survived.

Michael Klein, 37, Talia Klein, 13, and pilot Edwin Lasso, 23, were found dead in a mountainous region of Panama known as Las Ovejas, about 270 miles west of the capital, the civil protection agency said.

Francesca Lewis, a friend of Talia’s who was traveling with the Kleins, survived and was hospitalized with hypothermia and multiple traumas, said the agency in a statement. The severity of her injuries was not immediately clear.

Aviation authorities said the cause of the crash was not yet known, but RPC radio reported that witnesses saw the plane flying at a very low altitude around noon Sunday amid buffeting winds.

The group’s plane disappeared en route from Islas Secas, off Panama’s Pacific coast, to the Chiriqui volcano, about 285 miles west of the capital, Panama City.

The flight normally would have taken about 45 minutes, but controllers lost contact with the craft at about noon on Sunday.

Klein was on vacation with the two girls at an eco-resort he owns in the Central American nation, said ex-wife Kim Klein in a telephone interview with the Associated Press. The three had been scheduled to return to Santa Barbara, California, on Monday, she said.

She traveled to Panama on Monday morning and had offered $25,000 to anyone who could locate it.

Rescue workers and volunteers combed a mountainous area of western Panama on Tuesday looking for the wreckage.

Dense tropical foliage, mountainous terrain and heavy rains had been making air and land searches in the Chiriqui province extremely difficult, Rolando Rodriguez said earlier Tuesday.

Michael Klein was the chief executive officer of Pacificore LLC, a Santa Barbara-based company that manages several hedge funds and founded two companies in the 1990s before becoming president and CEO of eGroups Inc., which was the world’s largest group e-mail communication service.

According to an official of the Panamanian Civil Aviation (AAC), they were searching for a small aircraft which went missing in western Panama on Monday.

The aircraft was reported to be a Cessna 172, which disappeared from radar while flying from the Pacific island of Isla Seca to the town of Volcan in the heavily wooded Chiriqui province in Panama on Sunday, said Victor de la Hoz, an AAC official.

The rescue search earlier was suspended earlier due to bad weather.