Twelve US tourists and two South African crew members were killed when their light plane crashed on Mount Kenya, apparently after flying too close to the mountain, Africa’s second highest, a civil aviation official said on Sunday.
Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) operations chief Thomas Gesongori said that the plane had been bound for Samburu national park, north of Mount Kenya, when it crashed on Saturday.
KWS senior warden for Mount Kenya national park, Woodley Bongo, said people on the ground were ”guarding the wreckage scene until some police and other helicopters fly there at dawn, when the weather will permit.”
But given bad weather plaguing the remote and high-altitude area, rescue officials were forced to stay overnight in nearby Nanyuki and wait until Monday ”to overfly the mountain when it’s clear enough to retrieve the remaining bodies,” senior police
official David Kimaiyo said.
Bongo and Kimaiyo said the remoteness of the area, combined with the inclement weather, were delaying the operation until early on Monday. Bongo said the rescue exercise could take several days.
”It was a high-impact crash, the plane exploded and there are lots of stuff that will not be retrieved,” Bongo added.
Kimaiyo said rescue teams had recovered eight bodies from the wreckage and their identity documents.
”Most bodies were crushed beyond recognition, but we were able to get documents for eight US tourists,” Kimaiyo said. The US dead were members of three families, he said.
”The bodies recovered belonged to four women, two men and a boy and girl born between 1991 and 1992,” he said, adding: ”It was a terrible accident, as rescuers from the civil aviation and Kenyan police found human flesh scattered all over the scene.”
A Kenya Civil Aviation official said the two crew members were South African and the other 12 crash victims were from the United States.
Kimaiyo said the light plane, which had been chartered from a South African company, had stopped at Wilson Airport, a small facility in a southwest suburb of Nairobi.
According to South African officials, it had originally taken off from Mozambique.
The plane had arrived at Wilson Airport just after 2pm (1100 GMT), and then had a two-hour stopover before setting off again.
In Nairobi, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki sent messages of condolences to both US President George Bush South African President Thabo Mbeki and on the death of their nationals in the plane crash.
”The deaths of 12 American tourists and two South African crew members in a plane crash on Mount Kenya is very tragic and my prayers are with the families and friends of those who perished in the plane last evening,” Kibaki said in the letter to Mbeki and Bush.
Lenana, where the crash occurred, is the mountain’s third highest peak at 4 985 metres. Lenana is considered less difficult for amateur climbers than the mountain’s twin Nelion and Bation summits at 5 188 and 5 199 meters.
The plane crash is the worst in Kenya this year and comes only three weeks after an American pilot and a Canadian lion researcher died when their light plane crashed and burst into flames in Laikipia district of Kenya’s Rift Valley Province.
Last January, six Kenyan military personnel died when a Kenyan air force helicopter crashed in the eastern Machakos district. – Sapa-AFP