
Plane crash in Chad kills two people on rhino monitoring mission
N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - A small aircraft crashed near a village in Chad on Wednesday, killing its pilot and a passenger who were on a rhinoceros monitoring mission, the country's Civil Aviation Authority said.
The two-seater Savannah S aircraft operated by African Parks Network conservation group went down around 0500 GMT during a surveillance flight over Chad's southern Zakouma region, it said in a statement.
The South African pilot and an official from Chad's environment ministry died.
"The Civil Aviation Authority regrets to confirm that, according to information received, the two occupants tragically lost their lives in the accident," it said, adding that an investigation has been launched.
(Reporting by Mahamat Ramadane,; Writing by Bate Felix, editing by Ed Osmond)
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


New Straits Times
4 hours ago
- New Straits Times
Braving bullets and bodies to reach Israeli-approved aid
WHEN university professor Nizam Salama made his way to a southern Gaza aid point last week, he came under fire twice, was crushed in a desperate crowd of hungry people and finally left empty handed. The aid site in the city of Rafah was run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a new US-based organisation working with private military contractors. At the aid delivery site, known as SDS 1, queues snaked through narrow cage-like fences before gates were opened to an area surrounded by sand barriers where packages of supplies were left on tables and in boxes on the ground, according to undated CCTV video distributed by GHF, reviewed by Reuters. Salama said the rush of thousands of people once the gates opened was a "death trap." Salama's account matched the testimonies of two other aid seekers interviewed by Reuters. Salama, 52, had heard enough about the new system to know it would be difficult to get aid, he said, but his five children - including two adults, two teenagers and a nine-year-old - needed food. They have been eating only lentils or pasta for months, he said, often only a single meal a day. "I was completely against going to the aid site of the American company (GHF) because I knew and I had heard how humiliating it is to do so, but I had no choice because of the bad need to feed my family," said the professor of education administration. In total, 127 Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid from GHF sites in almost daily shootings since distribution under the new system began two weeks ago. The system appears to violate core principles of humanitarian aid, said Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, a major humanitarian organisation. He compared it to the Hunger Games, the dystopian novels that set people to run and fight to the death. "A few will be rewarded and the many will only risk their lives for nothing," Egeland said. "International humanitarian law has prescribed that aid in war zones should be provided by neutral intermediaries that can make sure that the most vulnerable will get the relief according to needs alone and not as part of a political or military strategy," he said. An Israeli defence official involved in humanitarian matters told Reuters GHF's distribution centres were sufficient for around 1.2 million people. Gaza's population is around 2.1 million. Salama and four neighbours set out from Mawasi, in the Khan Younis area of the southern Gaza Strip, early Tuesday for the aid site, taking two hours to reach Rafah, several miles away near the Egyptian border. Shooting started early in their journey. Some fire was coming from the sea, he said, consistent with other accounts of the incidents. Israel's military controls the sea around Gaza. By the time they reached Alam Roundabout in Rafah, about a kilometre from the site, there was a vast crowd. There was more shooting and he saw bullets hitting nearby. "You must duck and stay on the ground," he said, describing casualties with wounds to the head, chest and legs. He saw bodies nearby, including a woman, along with "many" injured people, he said. Another aid seeker interviewed by Reuters, who also walked to Rafah on June 3 in the early morning, described repeated gunfire during the journey. At one point, he and everyone around him crawled for a stretch of several hundred meters, fearing being shot. He saw a body with a wound to the head about 100 meters from the aid site, he said. When Salama finally arrived at the aid point on June 3, there was nothing left. Although the aid was gone, ever more people were arriving. "The flood of people pushes you to the front while I was trying to go back," he said. As he was pushed further towards where GHF guards were located, he saw them using pepper spray on the crowd, he said. "I started shouting at the top of my lungs, brothers I don't want anything, I just want to leave, I just want to leave the place," Salama said. "I left empty-handed... I went back home depressed, sad and angry and hungry too," he said.


The Sun
7 hours ago
- The Sun
Child survivor of Gaza family strike heads to Italy
ROME: An 11-year-old Palestinian boy who survived an Israeli air strike in Gaza last month, which killed his father and nine siblings, was due to arrive in Italy Wednesday for treatment. Adam and his mother, paediatrician Alaa al-Najjar, were due to fly to Milan in northern Italy on Wednesday evening alongside his aunt and four cousins, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said. 'Adam will arrive in Milan and will be admitted to the Niguarda (hospital), because he has multiple fractures and he will be treated there,' Tajani told Rtl radio. A plane carrying Palestinians in need of medical care is scheduled to land at 7:30 pm (1730 GMT) at Milan's Linate airport, according to the foreign ministry. Adam had a hand amputated and suffered severe burns across his body following the strike on the family house in the city of Khan Yunis on May 23. His mother was at work when the bomb hit the house, killing nine of her children and injuring Adam and his father, doctor Hamdi al-Najjar, who died last week. Al-Najjar, who ran to the house to find her children charred beyond recognition, told Italy's La Repubblica daily: 'I remember everything. Every detail, every minute, every scream.' 'But when I remember it's too painful, so I try to keep my mind focused entirely on Adam,' she said in an interview published Wednesday ahead of their arrival. Asked by his mother during the interview to describe his hopes, Adam said he wanted to 'live in a beautiful place'. 'A beautiful place is a place where there are no bombs. In a beautiful place the houses are not broken and I go to school,' he said, according to La Repubblica. 'Schools have desks, the kids study their lessons but then they go play in the courtyard and nobody dies. 'A beautiful place is where they operate on my arm and my arm works again. In a beautiful place my mother is not sad. They told me that Italy is a beautiful place,' he said. Al-Najjar said she has packed the Koran, their documents and Adam's clothes. 'I am heartbroken. I am leaving behind everything that was important to me. My husband, my children, the hospital where I worked, my job, my patients,' she said. 'People are dying of hunger. If not of hunger, of bombs. We would just like to live in peace,' she told the daily. Adam is one of 17 children being brought to Italy on Wednesday from Gaza along with relatives, Tajani said. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures. The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says at least 54,981 people, the majority civilians, have been killed in the territory since the start of the war. The UN considers these figures reliable.

The Star
21 hours ago
- The Star
Fire near Jogye temple halted, treasures spared
Relics in peril: Firefighters responding to a fire in the Central Buddhist Museum building next to Jogye Temple in Seoul. — Reuters A fire broke out in a building housing some of South Korea's national treasures neighbouring the historic Buddhist Jogye temple in Seoul, but it was later extinguished and there was no damage to the artefacts or injuries, fire officials said. More than 300 monks and officials from the Jogye order were evacuated safely, Jongno district fire department official Kang Kyung-chul told a briefing. Some three dozen fire trucks were deployed to the complex after clouds of smoke were seen billowing from the building, which is used by the Jogye order, the largest in the country, and also by a Buddhist museum that houses two national treasures and several cultural heritage artefacts. It was not immediately clear what national treasures were in the building. Firefighters prevented the fire in the concrete building from spreading to the temple's main hall, a largely wooden structure. The cause of the fire was under investigation, Kang said. Museum officials were preparing to temporarily move some of the items to protect them from soot and smoke damage. — Reuters