Sudanese state TV – Plane carrying Vice President John Garang is missing

By MOHAMED OSMAN

KHARTOUM, Sudan, July 31, 2005 (AP) — A plane carrying the former rebel who ascended to Sudan’s No. 2 leadership post after a recent peace agreement went missing Sunday in bad weather on its way back from Uganda, Sudanese state TV reported.

First Vice president John Garang .

President Omar el-Bashir had received a call saying that Vice President John Garang was flying from Uganda to a place in southern Sudan when contact with the plane was lost on Sunday.

Sudan was looking for the plane, the television reported.

“Contact with his plane has been lost since 6:30 p.m. because of bad weather,” the TV presenter said.

Earlier Sunday, Ugandan army spokesman 2nd Capt. Dennis Musitwa said the helicopter apparently went down Saturday. The discrepancy could not immediately be explained.

“They left yesterday in a Ugandan chopper,” Musitwa told The Associated Press on Sunday. “What we know is that the aircraft had weather problems and crash-landed.”

“We have not established where they landed. They have not reached where they are supposed to reach, and we are trying to locate them,” he said.

Garang had been on a private visit in Uganda, which has pledged to repair relations with Sudan now that peace has been declared in the southern war, Musitwa said.

Garang led the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in the war between the Muslim north and mainly Christian and animist south that ended in January with the signing of the peace pact, which provided a power sharing between the Khartoum government and Garang’s movement.

The settlement made Garang first vice president — second only to President Omar el-Bashir — as well as president of southern Sudan, letting him set up an interim administration there until a referendum in six years on secession.

The television said Garang was heading to a former SPLA base in southern Sudan when contact was lost with his aircraft.

Earlier in Nairobi, Kenya, an SPLA spokesman Yasir Arman said that Garang was “safe and sound” in southern Sudan. Arman declined to give further details, and there was no immediate reason for the apparently conflicting reports.