The vice president of Malawi, Saulos Klaus Chilima, along with nine other passengers, were on an airplane that vanished, the country’s presidency announced on Monday.
Malawi’s Office of the President and Cabinet announced in a statement that “all efforts by aviation authorities to make contact with the Aircraft since it went off the radar have failed thus far.”
According to the statement, search and rescue efforts were still on when Chilima, 51, was aboard a Malawi Defense Force aircraft that departed the nation’s capital, Lilongwe, at 9:17 a.m.
According to the statement, the plane was supposed to land at Mzuzu International Airport at 10:02 am.
According to the announcement, regional and national forces have been directed by President Lazarus Chakwera to launch a “immediate search and rescue operation to locate the whereabouts of the aircraft.”
Chakwera has subsequently canceled his trip to the Bahamas, where he was scheduled to make a working visit.
Chilima lost his position of authority in 2022 when he was detained and accused of graft in connection with a British-Malawian businessman’s bribery scheme.
Chilima appeared in court multiple times, and as a result, a Malawian court dropped the accusations last month.
A helicopter carrying Iran’s former president, Ebrahim Raisi, and other officials vanished for a few hours last month before it was determined to have been engaged in a “crash upon landing” in the country’s mountainous Varzaqan region during inclement weather.
The convoy consisted of three helicopters, two of which made a safe landing. Other passengers included Hossein Amirabdollahian, the foreign minister, and Malek Rahmati, the governor of the province of East Azerbaijan.
