Tunisia plane crash kills at least 18

An EygptAir plane with 63 people on board crashed while trying to land near Tunis yesterday, killing at least 18 people.

The plane, a Boeing 737, came down on a hillside about four miles from the Tunis-Carthage airport. It had been hindered by fog, rain and a sandy wind blowing from the Sahara desert.

The control tower had lost contact with the plane a few seconds before the crash, just after a distress call from the pilot, according to the national news agency, TAP.

Mahdi Fattallah, the Egyptian ambassador in Tunis, said there were 18 deaths so far out of 63 people on board – 55 passengers and eight crew members – and that 25 people had been taken to hospital. TAP said there were at least five deaths, and that 27 survivors had been evacuated.

The pilot survived but the co-pilot and the rest of the crew died, Mr Fattallah said.

Shaker Qilada, EgyptAir's vice-president for safety, denied reports that the plane, which was coming from Cairo, was making an emergency landing. "It was a normal landing approach. We have spoken to people on board since the crash," Mr Qilada said.

The weather was foggy and rainy at the time, with a sandy wind blowing from the Sahara desert. The sandy wind is known in Arabic as "khamsin," a name rooted in the Arabic word for the number 50. It refers to 50 days each year when winds blow sand from the desert, creating a suffocating, dirty blanket of air that hangs over the sky.

On 31 October 1999, an EgyptAir Boeing 767 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard. Before 1999, EgyptAir had not had a serious crash for 23 years.

* A Chinese airliner with 112 people aboard crashed into the water off north-eastern China yesterday after the captain reported a fire in the cabin, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It said six bodies had been found. The China Northern Airlines jet, an MD-82 airliner, crashed 280 miles east of Beijing.