BLANTYRE, Malawi —The vice president of Malawi, Saulos Chilima, was among the 10 killed in the crash of a small military plane in a mountainous region in the north of the country, the president announced on Tuesday. Chilima was 51 years old.
In a live address on state television, President Lazarus Chakwera announced that the wreckage of the plane had been located after more than a day of searching in the thick forests and mountains near the northern city of Mzuzu and that there were no survivors.
Former first lady Shanil Dzimbiri, ex-wife of former president Bakili Muluzi, was also traveling on the plane, which carried seven passengers and three military personnel, he added.
The group was traveling to Mzuzu to attend the funeral of a former government minister. Chilima had returned from an official visit to South Korea on Sunday.
Hundreds of soldiers, police and forestry agents searched for the plane that disappeared Monday morning during a 45-minute flight between the capital, Lilongwe, in the south of the country, and the city of Mzuzu, about 370 kilometers (230 miles) away. to the north.
Air traffic controllers told the plane not to attempt to land at Mzuzu airport due to bad weather and poor visibility and asked it to return to Lilongwe, Chakwera said in a hearing Monday night. The controllers then lost contact with the device, which disappeared from the radar, he added.
According to the president, it was a small propeller plane operated by the Malawian armed forces. The registration number he offered indicated that it was a twin-propeller Dornier 228 delivered to the army in 1988, according to the ch-aviation website that tracks information on aircraft.
About 600 people worked on the search operation in a vast forest plantation in the Viphya mountain range near Mzuzu, authorities said, including about 300 police officers, 200 soldiers and rangers in the area.
Chilima was the vice president of the country for the second time in his career since 2020. He had previously held the position between 2014 and 2019, during the presidency of Peter Mutharika.
He ran for president in 2019 and came third, behind Mutharika and Chakwera. The election was later annulled by Malawi’s Constitutional Court due to irregularities.
He then joined Chakwera’s campaign as his running mate in a historic rerun of the 2020 election, when they were elected.
Chilima was accused of corruption for receiving money in exchange for allegedly influencing the awarding of government contracts, but prosecutors dropped the charges against him last month. The vice president had denied the allegations, but the case sparked criticism of the Chakwera government for not taking a strong enough stance against corruption.
Malawi is a country of around 21 million people and was rated the fourth poorest in the world by the World Bank in 2019.
Source: AP
