Congo plane crash kills 21

A Congolese airliner trying to take off with about 80 people aboard careened off a runway, bursting into flames and killing at least 21 people in a busy market neighbourhood.

Airline chiefs said most of those aboard survived yesterday’s crash in Goma.

Witnesses said two dozen bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the DC-9 plane operated by the private Congolese company Hewa Bora Airways.

“The crew managed to save the majority of the passengers with the help of (United Nations peacekeepers) before the plane caught fire,” Hewa Bora representative Dirk Cramers said, adding the crash had killed 21 people.

“Most of the victims were people on the ground.”

Mr Cramers said the airline was “still trying to count the number of victims and wounded, but until now none of the 79 people on the official list of passengers and crew had been found dead.”

The Red Cross said 113 people had been injured and were being treated in local hospitals and clinics.

At the crash site, smoke and flames engulfed the charred ruins of the aircraft as tractors, trucks and hordes of people with shovels searched for survivors. UN peacekeepers sprayed the wreckage with water hoses, and soldiers kept some crowds back.

The damaged cockpit and tail were visible, and in between was the fuselage – a burned, flattened and tangled mixture of rubble and debris and charred shops, Anna Ridout of the aid agency World Vision said from the scene.

Rescue workers carried out about 20 corpses from the plane, many on stretchers, Ms Ridout said.

Last week, the European Union had added Hewa Bora to its blacklist of airlines banned from flying in the EU. The tragedy underscored the dangers of plane travel in Congo, which, still struggling to emerge from a 1998-2002 war, has experienced more fatal crashes than any other African country since 1945, according to the non-profit Aviation Safety Network.

Aid agency World Vision, whose employees visited the crash site, said the plane “failed to leave the ground”, ploughing “through wooden houses and shops in the highly-populated Birere market”.

A former pilot and passenger who survived the afternoon crash, Dunia Sindani, gave a similar account in an interview broadcast over a local UN radio station. The plane had a problem in one of its wheels – possibly a flat tyre – and did not gain the strength to lift off, Mr Sindani said.

Regional governor Julien Mpaluku said one of the plane’s pilots reported that an engine died as the plane taxied down the runway. When the pilots tried to brake, a tyre failed as well, the governor said.

It was unclear if weather played a part in the crash. It had stopped raining about one hour before the plane took off, residents said.

The plane appeared to have burst through a thin fence separating the runway from a market district of wooden houses and cement shops where sugar, avocados, flour and fuel are sold.

“I talked to a man who rescued seven people, including a six-month-old baby, from an exit door. They were still conscious and moving,” Ms Ridout said. “But he couldn’t go any further because he couldn’t see anything. There was too much smoke.”

Earlier, conflicting accounts had said the plane crashed just after take-off.

Mr Mpaluku said seven members of the flight crew were among the survivors.

The Hewa Bora plane was heading to the central city of Kisangani, then the capital, Kinshasa.

Goma’s runway has been partially blocked and effectively shortened by lava from a 2001 volcanic eruption in the town 700 miles east of Kinshasa.

In a statement, President Joseph Kabila expressed condolences to the affected families and called for an investigation into the cause of the crash.