A Chadian government minister and the secretary general in President Idriss Deby's office were killed with their pilot in a plane crash near the capital Ndjamena, officials said Thursday.
Their small six-seater chartered aircraft came down overnight Wednesday in a sandstorm just across the border from Chad in Cameroon.
The dead included Ali Ahmed Lanine, the minister for economic promotion and development, and Deby's aide Abderamane Dadi, who were overseeing a major oil exploitation project Chad is undertaking with Cameroon.
The Spanish pilot of the privately owned plane was also killed and a Cameroonian steward was badly injured, officials said.
The plane crashed into a tree, apparently because of poor visibility in the sandstorm, close to the town of Kousseri on the other side of the Chari river from Ndjamena, as it was coming down to land in the Chadian capital.
Nobody appeared to have been hurt on the ground.
The bodies of the top officials were buried in Ndjamena on Thursday after a Muslim religious ceremony attended by Deby and other government members. Tens of thousands of people turned out to follow the funeral cortege, an AFP correspondent reported.
The plane was chartered in Cameroon by the Chadian officials, who had been on their home from a meeting in Congo's capital Brazzaville of the board of governors of the Development Bank of Central African States – NDJAMENA (AFP)
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