Sydney, June 22 (DPA) Searchers have found the wreckage of a plane chartered by an Australian mining company in West Africa, former Sundance Resources chairman George Jones said Tuesday.
‘We’ve been told by our operatives in Cameroon that the aircraft has been located, there are 11 bodies that have been found, and there are no survivors,’ Jones told Australia’s ABC Radio.
Jones said it was too early to say what caused the Casa C212 twin turbo-prop to go down in jungle halfway through a one-hour flight from Yaounde, the Cameroon capital, to Yangadou in the Congo Republic.
‘The preliminary thought is that the plane hasn’t burnt extensively, so … it doesn’t look like an explosion or a fire,’ he said.
The plane did not put out a distress signal and had contacted the ground twice before it crashed.
Perth-based Sundance lost all six members of its board in the accident, prompting the company to ask for its shares to be suspended from trading.
The mining executives were in West Africa to inspect the Mbalam iron-ore project.
Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said identifying the bodies would be a ‘regrettably painstaking’ operation that could last weeks.
‘It will take longer than families would wish to repatriate the bodies,’ Smith said.
There are reports from Yaounde that the flight recorder has been found among the wreckage.
The six Sundance executives on board were billionaire mining magnate director Ken Talbot, Chairman Geoff Wedlock, chief executive Don Lewis, company secretary John Carr-Gregg and non-executive directors John Jones and Craig Oliver.
The five others were Natasha Flason, a Frenchwoman who worked for Talbot; US citizen Jeff Duff, a security consultant; an unidentified British citizen; and the two pilots, one French and the other British.
