Saulos Klaus Chilima

Malawi’s vice president and nine others have been killed in a Malawi Defence Force Aircraft carrying them, the country’s president said Tuesday.

A Malawi Defence Force Aircraft carrying the country’s Vice President, Dr. Saulos Klaus Chilima and nine others, had been declared missing on Monday.

The office of the Malawi President and Cabinet which made this known in a statement issued on Monday and signed by the Secretary to the President and Cabinet, Colleen Zamba, said that the aircraft took off from Lilongwe on Monday at 09:17am in the morning but failed to make its scheduled landing at Mzuzu International Airport at 10:02am.

The official statement noted that all efforts by the country’s aviation authorities to make contact with the aircraft since it went off the radar had failed thus far.

Hundreds of soldiers, police officers and forest rangers had been searching for the plane that also carried a former first lady after it went missing Monday morning while making the 45-minute flight from the southern African nation’s capital, Lilongwe, Q nu the city of Mzuzu, around 370 (230 miles) to the north.

Air traffic controllers told the plane not to attempt a landing at Mzuzu’s airport because of bad weather and poor visibility and asked it to turn back to Lilongwe, Chakwera said. Air traffic control then lost contact with the aircraft and it disappeared from radar, he said.

However, Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera in a live address on state television on Tuesday said the wreckage of the military plane carrying Vice President Saulos Chilima was located in a mountainous area in the north of the country after a search that lasted more than a day.

He noted that there were no survivors of the crash, according to AP.

Seven passengers and three military crew members were on board. The president described the aircraft as a small, propeller driven plane operated by the Malawian armed forces.

“The tail number he provided shows it is a Dornier 228-type twin propeller plane that was delivered to the Malawian army in 1988,” according to the aviation website that tracks aircraft information.

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