A United Nations helicopter on a routine flight in eastern Sierra Leone crashed into a hillside on Tuesday, killing all 24 people on board, a UN spokesperson said.
Sheila Dallas said the helicopter, an Mi8-MTV belonging to the Siberian-based UT Air charter company, was on a routine morning flight, normally lasting 70 minutes, to the town of Yengema when it was blinded by jungle thicket and crashed into a hill.
Air operations lost contact with the helicopter at 9.17am GMT, she added, about the time it had been due to land. A second helicopter was swiftly dispatched but was forced to land about 3km away due to the heavy ground cover.
”We flew in another helicopter near there, because you can’t get any vehicles in there and our soldiers went in on foot,” Dallas said by telephone from Freetown.
”We can confirm that there were no survivors. All 24 people on board are dead.”
Aside from the three-member Russian crew, the helicopter was carrying peacekeepers and aid workers from various NGOs, Dallas said.
The office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said from New York that an immediate investigation had been launched. No details were immediately forthcoming.
A spokesperson for the charter company that was servicing UN troops in the region, Igor Blinov, told Russia’s NTV television that the chopper fell on its side, causing a fire in a wooded area of the war-torn country, host to an 11 000-strong UN peacekeeping mission helping to rebuild after a decade of brutal rebel conflict.
”The rescue group that landed at the accident site only found bodies,” Blinov later told RIA Novosti news agency.
”We are not excluding any possibilities as to why our helicopter crashed,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
He added that the director of UT Air will head a commission of enquiry that was to fly to Sierra Leone on Wednesday to investigate the causes of the crash.
”We are absolutely confident that the helicopter was completely airworthy and in the high professionalism of the crew,” Blinov said.
Yengema, a rural forested area about 220km from the capital, Freetown, is home to a Pakistani military base helping to ensure security in the diamond-rich region near the border with Liberia.
Helicopters routinely shuttle supplies, equipment and other materials to the impoverished area.
Russia has sent more than 100 peacekeepers to Sierra Leone, including four combat helicopter teams that have served under Unamsil, the UN mission in the country, since they were deployed there in July 2000 by President Vladimir Putin.
Unamsil, which at its peak included about 17 000 peacekeepers, is in a drawdown phase of troops, with roughly 3 000 Ghanaian, Pakistani and Nigerian troops expected to remain come January 2005.
The UN Security Council in late March voted unanimously to extend the already five-year-old mission in the West African state until the end of 2005. — Sapa-AFP