At least 20 people were killed after a plane flown by the Belgian head of a local airline crashed while trying to land in western Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), officials said.
The Filair Czech-made twin turboprop crashed on Wednesday afternoon at Bandundu after a 300km flight from the capital Kinshasa, apparently after running out of fuel, Bandundu Province Deputy Governor Vicky Mboso Muteba said.
“They have brought out the people, we have 19 bodies in the morgue,” Mboso said.
One of two survivors later died in hospital.
PILOT KILLED
The owner of private airline Filair, Belgian Daniel Philemotte, 62, was at the controls of the Let-410 plane and was among those killed, along with the copilot and stewardess, Mboso added.
Mboso said that after an abortive attempt to land, the aircraft turned away and crashed toward the edge of the city of Bandundu, hitting an earthen house whose residents had managed to flee in time.
There was no explosion, said Mboso, who was one of the first to arrive on the site along with soldiers from MONUC, the UN mission in the Congo.
“Subject to expert opinion ... the presumed cause could be a lack of fuel,” Mboso said.
The Czech-made Let-410 normally carries up to 19 passengers.
An official of Kinshasa’s small Ndolo Airport, from which the flight took off, confirmed the crash, but did not provide any additional information.
BUSINESSMAN
A Belgian diplomat in Kinshasa said Philemotte was a well-known businessman in the country and had recently married a Congolese.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s aviation sector, which is littered with ageing Soviet-era planes, is generally viewed as being in a chronic state of disrepair and crashes are frequent.
All of the country’s 50-odd registered airlines have been placed on a EU blacklist, banning them from flying into European airspace.
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