Mother Teresa’s Plane Skids Into Crowd, Killing 5

A small plane carrying Nobel laureate Mother Teresa skidded into the crowd seeing her off Saturday and killed five people, Radio Tanzania said. No one on the plane was hurt.

Among those killed was a nun of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, according to Sister Celina, another member of the Roman Catholic order. She said two other nuns were hospitalized.

The accident occurred on the unpaved airstrip of the remote Hombolo missionary center in central Tanzania, about 200 miles west of Dar es Salaam.

Sister Celina, speaking by telephone from the hospital at Dodoma, the nearest town, identified the dead as Sister Clarapia of India, two boys ages 12 and 14, and two men, one of whom ran a center for lepers at the Hombolo mission.

State-run Radio Tanzania said the chartered flight, carrying Mother Teresa and two other passengers, was unable to get airborne and veered into the crowd. Officials in Dodoma said that those killed were mutilated by the propellers of the twin-engine Cessna.

Albanian-born Mother Teresa, 76, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work with the destitute and the dying at her mission headquarters in Calcutta and elsewhere in the Third World. She came to Tanzania on Friday after a visit to Sudan.