12 Americans on Photo Safari Killed in Rwanda Plane Crash

A small plane carrying 12 Americans on a safari to photograph gorillas slammed into a mountainside in northwestern Rwanda, killing the tourists and their Kenyan pilot, officials said Friday.

Some of the passengers screamed and frantically threw their belongings out of the plane as it careened out of control before crashing about 4 p.m. local time Thursday, according to witnesses quoted by Rwanda’s government-owned radio.

The propeller-driven Cessna 404 was on a two-hour flight from Goma, Zaire, in southern Africa to the East African nation of Kenya when it crashed near the village of Kishwati, near Rwanda’s border with Zaire.

Embassy Comment

“There were no survivors,” said an official at the U.S. Embassy in Kigal, the Rwandan capital.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Redman identified the Americans as Thomas Askelson of Sycamore, Ill.; Jill Cowan of The Woodlands, Tex.; Andrew Foster of Flint, Mich.; Franz (Rick) Heber of Monument, Colo.; Daniel Schwartz of Tampa, Fla., and Ernest Farino, Shirley Farino, Becky Fergerson, Nancy Gerald, Mary Slater, Donald Wilberforce and Thelma Yambao, all of Amarillo, Tex. Yambo, a Filipino, became a U.S. citizen last month.

Gene White, spokesman for Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in Amarillo, said Yambao was on the obstetrics and gynecology faculty at the school; Slater, 37, on the pediatrics faculty, and Schwartz, 45, on the obstetrics-gynecology clinical faculty.

Gorilla Mission

“They were going . . . to photograph gorillas,” White said.

John Ouma-Daniel, an executive with Cooper Skybird Air Charters of Nairobi, which owned the plane, said the Americans chartered the aircraft Nov. 30 for a safari to Zaire. He said the plane had been due back Thursday.

Rwanda’s government-owned radio quoted witnesses as saying the plane struck a tree and then hit the mountainside, where it exploded.

“Observers said that when the plane entered Rwandan airspace, it was already out of control,” said the radio, monitored in Nairobi.

“The passengers were seen waving their hands in despair and could be heard screaming.”

The radio said that at least some of the passengers were alive after it struck the tree, but died in the explosion.