Plane crash in Equatorial Guinea kills 55

Sunday, July 17, 2005

An Equatair plane carrying 55 people crashed on Saturday soon after take-off near the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Malabo. Witnesses told AFP the Antonov aircraft bound for Bata suddenly caught fire and crashed in a forest near Baney, a town some 19km from the capital. "No one survived -- the plane was destroyed," said Alfonso Nsue Mokuy, the Information minister of E Guinea, after rescue teams arrived at the crash site on Sunday.

The old propeller-machine took off at about 10am local time (9am UTC) and disappeared from the radar soon after, officials said.

Flying in Africa is considerably more dangerous than in other parts of the world. While accounting for only 3% of worldwide air traffic, 27% of all fatal airplane crashes occur in Africa according to Dutch-based Aviation Safety Network. This is blamed on the chronic under-investment many airline companies on the continent suffer from.

Sources

"Equatorial Guinea says all 55 on crashed plane died" — Reuters, July 17, 2005

"Many dead in E Guinea plane crash" — BBC News, July 17, 2005

Share this:

The text of this article has been released into the public domain. In the event that this is not legally possible, this article may be used for any purpose, without any condition, unless such conditions are required by law. This applies worldwide. Copyright terms on images, however, may vary, so please check individual image pages prior to duplication.
Please note that this only applies to Wikinews content created prior to September 25, 2005. All content created after that date is released under a Creative Commons license which is mentioned at the bottom of each article. This is currently the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.