A small passenger plane crashed into a mountain and then tumbled into a valley in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), killing all 17 passengers and crew, officials said on Friday.
The Antonov An-28 carrying 14 passengers and three Ukrainian crew members went down on Thursday afternoon as it approached the airport at Bukavu, in hilly eastern DRC, said Georges Matutu, a Bukavu civil-aviation official reached by telephone.
Matutu said the cause of the accident wasn’t known, but high winds were reported in the area. ”The plane tried to correct its position relative to the airport, but it hit a mountain, caught fire and went down,” he said.
Matutu said rescue crews had reached the burned wreckage in a valley about 50km north of Bukavu and found 12 bodies, including one child.
A spokesperson for the 17 600-member United Nations peacekeeping force in the DRC, Jean-Tobie Okala, said there were no survivors. No UN staff were among the victims, he said.
The plane was owned by a Congolese company, Trasept Congo, Matutu said.
Air passengers often rely on old and poorly maintained aircraft to travel around the DRC, a war-wrecked nation the size of Western Europe with only about 1 000km of paved roads.
The European Union has banned almost all of the DRC’s dozens of airlines from flying to European airspace. Planes, which also often transport goods in the hold, may have little more than plastic chairs for passengers to sit on.
On July 8, an Antonov cargo plane crashed in the mountains of the eastern DRC, killing three Russian pilots and two Congolese passengers. — Sapa-AP