An Antonov 26 aircraft has crashed in flames in northeast Angola, civil aviation officials said yesterday. A travel agency which chartered the jet said all 42 passengers and six crew were killed.
Troops have been sent to find the wreckage of the plane, which was crewed by Russians and crashed on Tuesday evening in the Mona-Quimbundo region in Lunda-Sul province, 1,200 km east of Luanda.
Aviation officials refused to confirm a death toll of 48 initially given by the Guicango travel agency and reported by Portugal's LUSA news agency. "No information is available on the number of passengers and crew," one official said, while Guicango executive Mr Jose Neto said the number of passengers was unclear.
The Russian-built plane exploded in the air after taking off from Suarimo, the capital of the diamond-rich Lunda-Sul province, heading for Luanda, according to an initial LUSA report.
Villagers at Mona-Quimbundo, 42 km southwest of Saurimo, saw the aircraft in flames before it crashed, the civil aviation service said, but the cause of the accident was not known.
Civil aviation officials said radio contact was lost with the plane about 20 minutes after takeoff.
The head of the civil aviation authority, Mr Branco Ferreira, yesterday repeated a pledge to have all foreign pilots pass tests in the southwest African country, where such disasters are frequent.
"We're going to do this perhaps this month," Mr Ferreira said. Officials had initially announced tests for foreign pilots at the end of October, but they were postponed for technical reasons.
Many deadly plane crashes in Angola, which has also been torn for a quarter of a century by civil war between government troops and rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), have involved Antonovs.
The latest crash was the eighth major accident reported in five years in the north-eastern LundaNorte and Lunda-Sul provinces, where UNITA controls much of the terrain and is determined to maintain a hold over the diamond mines.
In late 1998 alone, no fewer than four Antonovs crashed or disappeared in the area: one at Kafunfu, with 20 dead, in August, another simply vanishing, a further crash at Saurimo, in LundaSul, in mid-December and then another disappearance in the Lukapa region 10 days later.