By Barry Hatton
January 13, 1999
LUANDA, Angola -- The rebel group UNITA said today it has found the site where the second of two U.N.-chartered planes crashed in Angola and that there were no survivors.
Nine people were aboard the C-130 cargo plane, which went down Jan. 2 shortly after takeoff from the central highland city of Huambo. As an earlier flight, it crashed in a region of heavy fighting between the government and the rebels, who accuse each other of shooting down the planes.
The United Nations suspended all its flights in Angola following the two plane crashes, raising fears of a humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their rural homes since the war resumed last month.
UNITA Secretary General Paulo Lukamba Gato, speaking by satellite phone from the central highlands, refused to say where the site was.
But he said the rebels have told the United Nations the exact location and offered to escort U.N. investigators to the area.
``The whole country is at war,'' he said, adding that the government controlled only the provincial capitals, ``and one or two towns'' of the vast, southwest African country.
Officials in Luanda corroborated Gato's comments, saying the government has mounted defensive positions around the main provincial cities, while the rebels control much of the countryside and main roads.
The government supplies the cities by air.
The plane was carrying four Angolans, two Filipinos, an American, a Namibian and 25-year-old South African Hilton Wilkinson. Four of the nine worked for the United Nations and four were crew members.
Wilkinson had boarded the plane in a quest to find his father John, who was piloting another U.N.-chartered cargo plane that went down Dec. 26 after taking off from the same airport with 14 people aboard.
A U.N. team found no survivors at the first crash site, near Huambo. The investigators were escorted by the government's army after it regained control of the area.
Battles flared anew last month as the government tried to seize the rebels' central highland strongholds, shattering a 1994 U.N.-brokered peace accord that was to end a two-decade civil war.
UNITA -- a Portuguese acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola -- secured the bases and then launched a broader offensive throughout the central highlands.
