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Tag: Angola

  • Mozambique Airlines Crash Found in Namibia; 33 Dead

    After delaying the search due to heavy rain Friday afternoon, the wreckage of a Mozambique Airlines flight has been found in Bwabwata National Park, near the borders of Angola and Botswana. “The plane has been completely burnt to ashes and there are no survivors,” stated Willy Bampton, deputy commissioner of the Namibia Police Force.

    On Friday, a Mozambique Airlines Embraer 190 aircraft took off from Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and was headed toward Luanda, the capital of Angola, when it crashed near the border of Angola and Botswana. “We could see it on our radar, and we could see it was descending very quickly, at a rate of about 100 feet per second. We lost it from our screens at 3,000 feet above sea level,” reported Tobias Günzel, acting director of Namibia’s Civil Aviation Department.

    While one thinks it would not be hard to find a crashed plane, one has to take into account the geography of where the plane crashed. Bwabwata National Park is 2,422 square miles in area and is part of the Tree and Shrub Savannah biome, meaning it is one of the more wooded areas of the African plains. The park is home to diverse wildlife, such as elephants, lions, and wild dogs, and hence carries a low population-density.

    The park is also surrounded by rivers and has no paved roads, making access to the area extremely difficult. Namibian authorities called in helicopters to help with the search on Friday, but had to recall the search due to unfavorable weather conditions.

    Of the 33 people who died in the wreck, 6 were crew, 10 were from Mozambique, 9 were from Angola, 5 were from Portugal, and there was one citizen from each of France, Brazil, and China.

    Embraer, the Brazilian company who manufactures the plane model which crashed, has stated that “… a team of Embraer technicians is preparing to go to the scene of the accident,” in order to investigate the cause of the wreck.

    However, the fault may not lie with the plane manufacturer. In 2012, African airlines accounted for nearly half of the fatalities from Western-manufactured airplanes despite only being responsible for 3% of worldwide air traffic.

    Tony Tyler, the CEO of the International Air Transport Association, has gone on record as stating that “… the overall safety record for Africa remains a problem that we must fix.”

    Hopefully this crash, which resulted in 33 fatalities of people from multiple nations and destroyed part of a national park, will be the incentive Africa needs to improve its airline safety.

    Image via Mozambique Airlines’s Website

  • Angola Bans The Islamic Religion

    The African country, Angola, has declared the Islamic religion illegal, becoming the first country to do so. Until further notice, the predominantly Christian community, has ordered that all mosques be shut down. It has been reported that some mosques have already been destroyed with the possibility of more demolition to come.

    “The legalisation of Islam has not been approved by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights [and] their mosques will be closed until further notice,” said minister of culture Rosa Cruz e Silva said on Friday, November 22.

    The Muslims account for less than one percent of the country’s total population of 19 million people. “This is the final end of Islamic influence in our country,” President Jose Edurado dos Santos said.

    (image)
    [Image via Wikimedia Commons]

    Islam is not the only religion that has been banned in the country. 194 other sects have been outlawed, and, according to Sliva, more may soon be banned as well. “All sects on the list published by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights in the Angolan newspaper Jornal de Angola are prohibited to conduct worship, so they should keep their doors closed,” Cruz said. “Besides these, there is a long list of more than 1,000 applications to be authorized.”

    [Image via Wikimedia Commons]

  • Lackluster Landmine Efforts ‘Irritate’ Prince Harry

    Sky News reports that Prince Harry is “irritated” that nations responsible for producing landmines are taking little responsibility in removing them.

    The prince’s opinion came secondhand from HALO Trust chief executive Guy Willoughby, who said that “The Prince has got quite a bee in his bonnet” about the lack of progress made in the area of landmine removal, and that it’s a good thing. “He is irritated that the countries which supplied these landmines are not actually putting in any funds to clear them, 25 years on.” The prince is a Patron of the HALO Trust 25th Anniversary Appeal.

    The HALO Trust was considered a pet charity for Princess Diana of Wales, who visited Angola to support the organization before she passed away in 1997. Of the charities that specialize in the removal of problematic abandoned explosive ordnance, the HALO Trust is the oldest nonprofit of its kind.

    The news comes in the wake of Harry’s trip to Angola last week to see how the HALO Trust was doing in its efforts to remove dangerous ordnance that remains scattered throughout the country. Angola was embroiled in a decades-long civil war that left half a million people dead and over four million others as refugees, and the HALO Trust has reported destroying over 21,300 mines in Angola since the war ended. Even still, the country is one of the most heavily mined in the world.

    Willoughby told the BBC News that “As a soldier [Harry] is seeing so many people of his generation, of his age losing limbs. And that has really brought a focus on it… I think it has brought a focus on it for a lot of the British population of seeing so many people in their 20s who are losing limbs.”

    “He is technically very competent but he’s also very good with dealing with the people, the villagers, the de-miners and he understands the big issue, even the political issue,” Willoughby said about Harry’s involvement in the project.

    Image courtesy the Halo Initiative.