Seventeen killed in landmine incident

At least 17 people were killed and about 15 injured when the lorry in which they were travelling detonated an anti-tank land mine 13 km outside Angola’s second city, Huambo. Western diplomats, confirming a national television report which said 10 had died, told IRIN on Friday that a number bodies of people who had reportedly been hacked to death by machete, were also found near the scene of the explosion on Tuesday. Further details were not immediately available. Huambo, some 600 km south of Luanda, is crammed with tens of thousands of people displaced by fighting in the area between government forces and the UNITA rebel movement which has spread around the country over the past month, scuppering the UN-brokered 1994 Lusaka Protocol peace accords. It was outside Huambo, a government-controlled city subjected to periodic artillery barrages by UNITA, where two UN aircraft were shot down, one on 26 December with 14 aboard, and the other on 2 January with nine passengers and crew. UN officials, who said they had only located the first aircraft, announced on Friday that they were still awaiting permission from UNITA to send a search team to the second aircraft, despite earlier pledges by UNITA to lead a UN team to the crash site. The UN officials also complained that they had only had a few hours access at the site of the first crash in territory seized by government forces and that they had therefore still been unable to find out in detail what had happened. Both aircraft were carrying personnel of the UN Observer Mission in Angola (MONUA). The downing of the two Hercules C-130 transport planes brought a stop to all UN flights in Angola and with increased fighting, prompted the withdrawal to Luanda of MONUA military and police personnel posted around the country to monitor the Lusaka Protocol and protect humanitarian convoys. The diplomats said the UN Special Representative Issa Diallo was scheduled to meet with the Angolan president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, later on Friday shortly before UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan delivers new recommendations on the UN presence in Angola to the Security Council. Meanwhile, a senior humanitarian affairs official, Martin Griffiths, arrived in Luanda to discuss the future of humanitarian operations in Angola where an estimated one million people are in need of urgent assistance.