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DRC plane crash toll hits 38
05/10/2007 09:12 - (SA)
Kinshasa - A Soviet-era cargo plane crashed in a residential area in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday, killing 23 people on board and 15 on the ground as it ploughed into houses and exploded in a fireball.
The ministry of humanitarian affairs said: "This plane had on board, as well as the three crew members, 20 passengers who all died."
Fifteen were killed on the ground and 30 injured after the Antonov 26 crashed in the heavily-populated neighbourhood of Kimbaseke on the eastern outskirts of Kinshasa, one of the largest cities in Africa.
Serge Mulumba, a senior official at the ministry, said the aircraft "messed up its takeoff" for unknown reasons at the nearby international airport of Kinshasa-Ndjili and crashed.
Aircraft 'completely burned out'
The dead included two children aged seven and eight. A mother and baby, at least nine other children were also killed, said the ministry. A mechanic managed to escape from the wreckage, but later died of his injuries.
Witnesses said the twin-engined plane burst into flames once it crashed, destroying about a dozen houses. Information Minister Toussaint Tshilombo Send said: "There were several dead people in the houses."
A senior police officer said: "The aircraft is completely burned out."
The plane belonged to a private Congolese company on an European Union safety blacklist and was headed for Tshikapa, 650km to the east in the central province of Kasai-Occidental.
The disaster was the fourth deadly plane accident since June in the DRC, which had a long record of such crashes. The RVA national aviation authority sent firefighters to help poorly equipped city firemen tackle the blaze.
More than 300 people killed
Rescue workers and local Red Cross teams went in to try to find and help survivors and start the grim task of pulling bodies out of the collapsed ruins of homes.
In 1996, a larger Antonov 32 hit a market in central Kinshasa, killing more than 300, while in May 2003 up to 200 people died on a flight between the capital and Lubumbashi in the southeast.
The Antonov's crew had informed airport authorities that five crew and 14 passengers were on board, but an RVA official told AFP it was common practice to declare an incorrect passenger manifest in order to avoid taxes.
The crew were Russians, according to a Russian embassy official in Kinshasa, Alexander Turtsinovitch, but he did not know how many there were.
The Antonov 26, a twin-propeller transport aircraft whose design dated back to the 1960s, was made in Ukraine and was typical of the ageing fleet that had become an essential part of the transport infrastructure in the DRC.
Africa One was on an European Union list of airlines banned in Europe because of safety concerns. Only one of more than 50 companies in the central African nation, the privately owned Hewa Bora Airways, was exempted from that blacklist.
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