Sudanese VP, former rebel leader Garang killed in helicopter crash
KHARTOUM (AFP) - Sudan's vice president and former southern rebel leader John Garang has died in a helicopter crash, officials said, dealing a blow to a landmark peace deal signed in January with Khartoum to end more than 20 years of civil war.
"The presidency has followed the reports about the disappearance of the aircraft of Sudanese Vice-President John Garang and it is confirmed beyond doubt that it crashed in the Amatonj mountains," said a statement from Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir.
"It resulted in the death of John Garang and six people accompanying him as well as seven members of the crew of the Ugandan presidential aircraft," said the statement, which was read on state television.
The Amatonj mountains are in the Eastern Equatorial province of Sudan near the border with Uganda.
A Ugandan official later said in Kampala that the wreckage of a crashed Ugandan helicopter and the bodies Garang and the 13 other people on board had been located in a remote area of southern Sudan.
Two Ugandan official said earlier the crash occurred Saturday after Garang and his entourage left Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's ranch in western Uganda heading for his base, known as New Site, in southern Sudan aboard a presidential MI-72 helicopter but were unable to land there due to poor weather.
A statement from Museveni's office said the chopper had last been heard by villagers near the town of Pirre near the Kenyan border and a second Ugandan official said the crash was due solely to inclement weather.
"This was a presidential helicopter and it had enough fuel, the cause was simply bad weather," the official told AFP.
Garang, 60, the head of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), became vice president only three weeks ago following the January peace deal that ended 21 years of conflict between north and south Sudan, then Africa's longest-running civil war.
Garang had been in Uganda to meet with Museveni and US and EU diplomats.
In the Kenyan capital, officials said the SPLM/A had confirmed Garang's death in the crash to diplomats and expressed concern his demise could affect the peace pact.
Retired Kenyan General Lazaro Sumbeiywo, the chief mediator in six years of halting peace talks that yielded the agreement, said he hoped Garang's death would not lead to the collapse of the agreement....
(snip)
... The tall, balding, US-educated economist-turned-guerrilla once derided in the West as a Soviet stooge, had finally won respectability as southern leader....
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