KINSHASA—A cargo plane carrying presidential staff crashed in eastern Congo on Oct. 10, and all eight passengers and crew are feared dead, a presidential adviser told Reuters on Friday.
The plane, carrying President Felix Tshisekedi’s driver, a logistics manager and some soldiers, was headed from Goma to the capital Kinshasa and went off radar on Thursday afternoon, an hour after departing, a statement from the civil aviation authority said.
Debris of the plane has been found but the passengers are still missing, said adviser Vidiye Tshimanga. He had told Reuters earlier on Friday that eight bodies had been found but said that information was incorrect.
The cause of the accident was not yet clear.
Local media showed a crowd of hundreds of Tshisekedi supporters hitting the streets of Kinshasa after the news broke on Friday morning, fearing that the plane crash had been some kind of failed coup attempt against Tshisekedi.
The president took over from long-standing former President Joseph Kabila this year.
No information immediately backed up such a claim.
Cargo Plane Crash-Lands in Ukraine
In a similar incident a week ago on Friday, Oct. 4, four crew members died when a cargo plane crashed after disappearing from radar. The Ukrainian Antonov-12 cargo airplane had to make an emergency landing near the western airport of Lviv, officials said.
The Soviet-designed four-engine plane vanished from radar at 7:10 a.m. (local time) when it was 13.7 km (8.5 miles) from the airport, the emergency service said in a statement.
Officials said the military cargo plane carried a total of eight people.
The landing was made ‘in connection with the end of the fuel’, Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Vladyslav Kryklii said later on Facebook, adding that the plane had been flying to Lviv from Spain.
The crew had scheduled to refuel in Lviv, Ukraine’s Unian news agency reported.
NTD staff contributed to this report.
