UN staff die in S Leone air crash

UN workers depend on helicopters to travel around Sierra Leone

All 24 people on board a United Nations helicopter are dead after it crashed in eastern Sierra Leone, UN officials say.

The bodies of all the victims were later found at the site of the crash, near the town of Yengema.

The Russian-built Mi-8 helicopter was carrying members of the UN peacekeeping mission and aid workers from the capital, Freetown to the west of the country.

Fourteen Pakistani peacekeepers, six of them officers, were among the dead, the country's military said.

In addition to the three Russian crew, the manifest for the flight also listed one UN volunteer from Ghana, three Sierra Leone citizens, a Tanzanian and a Ugandan, the Associated Press news agency said.

The New-York-based International Rescue Committee told BBC News Online that two of its staff were among the victims.

They are Allan Mukuru, 35, a Ugandan and director of the IRC's aid programmes in Sierra Leone, and Bahati Barongo, 37, a Tanzanian based in Freetown.

The aircraft fell in a remote area covered in dense forest.

A local farmer told AP he watched the flight's last seconds.

"I saw this aircraft coming down and it hit a tree and it burst into flames," he said.

UN recovery teams had to use a second helicopter to reach the crash site, a UN spokesperson said in New York.

Big player

There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash.

The UN has deployed about 11,000 peacekeepers in Sierra Leone since the country's 1991-2002 civil war.

There have been no known attacks on UN officials since the fighting stopped.

UT Air, the Russian charter company which owned the helicopter, is a major player in the air charter industry with 301 available aircraft.

It carried a total of 1.5 million passengers in 2003.

It has frequently been used by the UN in peacekeeping operations in East Timor, DR Congo and Eritrea as well as Sierra Leone.