U.N. Plane With 14 Aboard Reportedly Crashes in Angola

UNITED NATIONS —  A U.N. aircraft with 14 people on board reportedly crashed Saturday in Angola in an area where the government’s army has been fighting UNITA rebels, a U.N. spokesman said.

There was no word on whether any of the 10 passengers and four crew members had survived. There also was no immediate information on the cause of the crash.

Most of the passengers were members of the U.N. Observer Mission, said deputy U.N. spokesman Monoel de Almeida e Silva. The military observers are charged with monitoring a 1994 peace accord that is severely threatened by the current fighting.

The Portuguese news agency Lusa said the aircraft burst into flames shortly after takeoff from Huambo, 310 miles southeast of the capital, Luanda, and crashed 25 miles away in Vila Nova.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealed to the Angolan government and UNITA to enable members of the U.N. mission in Angola to go to the crash site and assist in search-and-rescue operations.

According to preliminary information from government sources in Huambo, the C-130 probably went down in an area east of Vila Nova, the U.N. spokesman said in a statement.

The plane, owned by TransAfric and chartered by the United Nations, was headed for Saurimo, in the province of Lunda Sul, about 390 miles northeast of Huambo, according to the Portuguese news agency.

The U.N. Security Council has expressed dismay that Angola appears headed back to civil war, which has ravaged the southwest African nation for most of its nearly quarter-century of independence. The fighting has sent more than 50,000 people fleeing from their homes in the central highlands.

Diplomats have been unable to get both sides to adhere to the 1994 accord. It called for UNITA, a Portuguese acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, to hand areas under its control to the government.