Body of German recovered as air search continues

The body of a passenger from the German military aircraft which crashed on Saturday off the coast of Angola was found yesterday…

The body of a passenger from the German military aircraft which crashed on Saturday off the coast of Angola was found yesterday, the German Defence Minister, Mr Volker Ruehe, said on television last night.

The minister gave no details about how the body was found. He only said that the body had been found at about 8 p.m. local time and would be brought back to land today.

German military officials had said earlier yesterday that it was still too early to tell whether the German and US aircraft that vanished at the same time and place over the South Atlantic had collided in mid-air.

The officials, who have sent search teams to an area off the coast of Angola and Namibia in western Africa where the aircraft lost radio contact on Saturday, said it was highly improbable anyone could have survived.

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"We still don't know what happened to this aircraft," a German army spokesman, Mr Hans-Dieter Poth, said of the German Soviet-built Tupolev TU-154. It was bound for Cape Town in South Africa with 24 people on board. "The information we have suggests a collision cannot be ruled out but this information has not yet been confirmed," Mr Poth said.

A US military official in Washington said it was "most likely" that the Tupolev had been involved in a mid-air collision with a US C-141 military cargo plane, carrying nine people.

A Namibian fishing vessel yesterday found some wreckage with fragments of German newspapers. German military officials, who have also sent rescue teams to the scene, said earlier, however, that it was too soon to say if this was the missing aircraft.

Mr Poth said the German pilot had been extremely experienced and the aircraft had recently been serviced. He said there were no ground controls in this part of the world to guide the plane but this did not mean it was dangerous to fly there, as pilots navigated the route in other ways.

"Those who fly there know the circumstances, that they will not be picked up by radar from ground stations. They inform each other and keep to flight quotas and prescribed altitudes," he said.

But a German Radio report said the weather had been misty on Saturday afternoon as the planes flew off the coast of Angola and visibility had been poor. The report also said the radio frequencies used by the pilots to communicate might have been overburdened, preventing contact.

The US European Command for the armed forces in Stuttgart said two C-130 aircraft based at Mildenhall air force base in eastern England would be sent to west Africa to help in the search. Two South African Air Force planes were also in the area.