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U.N. Helicopter Crashes off Sierra Leone |
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Four people remained missing Thursday after a U.N. helicopter crashed into the sea off Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said Thursday.
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Four people remained missing Thursday after a U.N. helicopter crashed into the sea off Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said here Thursday.
Three bodies have been recovered before the searching operations discontinued at midnight on Wednesday, the spokesman said, adding that the search and rescue operations resumed at 6:00 a.m. local time and are under way.
Eckhard told a press conference here that the helicopter had seven people on board when it crashed Wednesday at 7:50 p.m. local time Wednesday shortly after its take-off from the U.N. field peacekeeping operation headquarters in the capital of Sierra Leone.
"Initial indications are that the cause of the accident was mechanical," he said. "No sabotage is suspected."
The crew was part of a U.N. peacekeeping force that is in Sierra Leone disarming combatants in a brutal 10-year civil war.
The disarmament is the key to end fighting in the West African nation, where tens of thousands of civilians have become casualties of the rebel campaign to seize the government and lucrative diamond fields.
The Mi-8 helicopter was flying from local U.N. headquarters to a U.N. base at the airport across the bay at Lungi to meet a Zambian delegation, the officials said.
Four Ukrainian crew members, two Zambian officers with the U.N. mission and one civilian air operations staff member from Bulgaria were on board, he said.
The bodies recovered were those of crew commander Volodimir Savchuk, pilot Sergei Filipovich and a U.N. representative whose name was not given, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has given his "heartfelt condolence" to the governments of Ukraine and Zambia and to family of the victims, Eckhard said.
Under pressure from the U.N. and British forces, as well as troops from neighboring Guinea, the rebels signed a cease-fire with the government last November. Since then, about 25,000 combatants have disarmed, including about half the rebel force.
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