An army plane fell out of the sky over southwestern Congo on Friday. It killed everyone aboard. Fourteen people died, and among them were two of the country’s senior soldiers.
The plane was flying from the city of Kikwit to the capital, Kinshasa. It developed a technical fault on the way and tried to put down at Kenge, in Kwango province. It crashed there instead, according to local officials, and no one on board survived.
The military named the two dead generals. They were Lieutenant General Mutombo Katalayi Tiende, the head of the military court, and Lieutenant General Bakumi Likulia, the auditor general of the armed forces, the Associated Press reported.
In addition to the two general officers, twelve members of the delegation and the crew members also lost their lives in this accident.
That was Major General Efomi Ekenge, the spokesman of the Congolese military, in a statement on Friday. He said an investigation has been opened to determine the cause of the crash.
Tryphon Kin-Kiey Mulumba, the chairman of the board of the Civil Aviation Authority, said the cause of the crash is unknown.
The crash comes while the Congolese military fights on another front. Since last year the army has been battling scores of rebel groups in the east of the country, among them the Rwanda-backed M23, after a blitz of attacks in which the rebels seized key cities. The dead generals were men at the top of that army’s justice and its accounts. They died on a routine flight home to the capital, in a plane that told the ground it was in trouble and looked for a place to land.