At least 14 people were killed on Monday when a Kenyan military plane carrying government officials and several lawmakers crashed near a game park in central Kenya, authorities said.
”Fourteen people died in the crash and we have yet to get information on the others,” Major General Paul Opiyo told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Details of the incident were sketchy but officials said the Kenyan Air Force Buffalo plane went down at about 10am in the vicinity of the Marsabit National Park, about 430km north-east of Nairobi.
”A Y-12 military aircraft en route from Nairobi to Marsabit … has crashed as it approached Marsabit airstrip,” said Njenga Karume, Kenya’s Minister of State for Defence.
”The government has dispatched a search-and-rescue team to support rescue operations which are in progress,” he said in a statement.
Karume said 17 passengers and crew were on the plane when it went down in what witnesses said was a heavy downpour, but other officials said 18 people, including an assistant minister and MPs from the area, had been on board.
Farid Abdul Kadir, head of disaster operations for the Kenyan Red Cross Society, told AFP the plane had caught fire and that only four people were known to have survived.
”Of those who were on board, we only managed to take four people to hospital,” he said. ”It was a very bad crash. We are trying to get body bags there. My workers on the ground are trying to pull out bodies from the wreckage.”
Those on board the plane were headed to Marsabit for meetings in a bid to defuse tribal tensions there.
Their exact identities were not immediately known.
Witnesses told local media that the plane, which was normally stationed at the Eastleigh Air Force base in the capital, had crashed on a hill near the town of Marsabit during a heavy downpour. — Sapa-AFP