Plane crash in Congo kills seven

An Antonov plane crashed near the town of Isiro in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo yesterday, killing all seven people on board, a civil aviation authority official said.

"An Antonov-26 airplane coming from Beni crashed today just before reaching the airstrip in Isiro," Andre Bakajika, head of civil aviation in the northeastern Oriental province, told Reuters by telephone.

"The tower lost contact and the plane crashed and burned. None of the seven people on board survived the impact or the fire," he said.

Mr Bakajika said the plane belonged to a private Congolese company and that bad weather may have been to blame for the accident some 340 kilometres northeast of the provincial capital Kisangani.

A five-year civil war which ended in 2003 destroyed much of Congo's infrastructure. Planes, many of them decades old, are often the only way of covering huge distances in a country the size of Western Europe.

An Antonov plane smashed into a cliff in eastern Congo in May, killing its Russian pilot, four Ukrainian crew and 21 Congolese passengers.