Aid Plane Crashes in E. Congo; 17 Aboard

NAIROBI, Sept. 2 -- A small plane carrying 17 passengers and crew members on a humanitarian mission crashed in a mountainous region of eastern Congo on Monday evening, and there appeared to be no survivors, U.N. officials said Tuesday.

The Beechcraft 1900 took off from the Congolese city of Kinsangani about 4 p.m. Monday and crashed in stormy weather into a ridge about nine miles northwest of the town of Bukavu, said Lt. Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Congo.

Aid workers from two U.N. agencies, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the U.N. Development Program, were on board, he said. According to the Reuters news agency, aid workers from the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders and from Handicap International were also on the plane.

The flight was operated by Cem Air, a South African company that had been subcontracted by Virginia-based Air Serv International, according to a statement from Air Serv, a 25-year-old nonprofit organization that runs aid flights in some of the world's most difficult environments, including Congo, Chad, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The United Nations had contracted Air Serv to supplement its own humanitarian flights, which carry hundreds of aid workers around Congo every day, said Dietrich, adding that the arrangement was not unusual.

The plane went missing Monday, and by Tuesday afternoon the United Nations had dispatched helicopters to the remote area on a search-and-rescue mission. But judging from an aerial survey of the crash site, Dietrich said, "it looks like everybody has died."

Emergency vehicles were on their way toward the scene Tuesday evening, though it was unclear whether the area would be accessible by road, he said.

Poor or nonexistent roads, along with an almost complete lack of government emergency services, have made rescue efforts notoriously difficult in the vast Central African nation, which is struggling to recover from more than a decade of civil war.

Congo has the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, a force that is mostly concentrated in the eastern part of the country, along with other relief groups. The green and hilly eastern region has been plagued for years by fighting among various rebel groups, militias and government forces. Conflict continues despite a peace accord signed in January.

More than 150,000 people have been displaced by fighting in the region so far this year, and an estimated 1 million people have been driven from their homes by previous waves of fighting.