JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Investigators arrived in Namibia on Sunday to try to determine the cause of a Mozambique Airlines plane crash that killed 33 people, as the remains of the victims were transported to a police mortuary in the Namibian capital, Windhoek.
The Angola-bound plane crashed Friday in a Namibian national park near the border with Angola, and there were no survivors. Searchers found the burned wreckage on Saturday in a remote area that is inaccessible by road.
The Brazilian-made Embraer 190 aircraft had broken into pieces, said Willie Bampton, a deputy police commissioner who visited the accident site, according to the Namibia Press Agency. Some of the passengers’ belongings were found about half a kilometer (one-third of a mile) from the crash location, he said.
The aircraft was carrying six crewmembers and 27 passengers, including 10 Mozambicans, nine Angolans, five Portuguese, and one citizen each from France, Brazil and China, said Mozambique Airlines. A Namibian military plane was transporting their remains to Windhoek.
A Mozambican team of investigators arrived in Namibia on Sunday morning and teams from Brazil and Angola were expected later in the day, the Namibia Press Agency quoted Capt. Ericsson Nengola as saying. Nengola is the director of aircraft accident investigation in Namibia’s ministry of works and transport.
It was not yet known whether Botswana will also send an investigation team to Namibia, since the plane went through Botswana’s airspace before crashing in Namibia, Nengola said, according to the agency.
He said a voice recorder was recovered from the aircraft, but the black box, another device containing flight data, had not been recovered. The wreckage will be transported to a hangar in the nearby town of Rundu as part of the investigation.
