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A military aircraft crashed in eastern Sudan, killing all on-board, said military officials on Wednesday, although they didn’t disclose how many personnel lost their lives.

The Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane is said to have experienced technical failure while attempting to land on Tuesday in the Osman Digna Air Base in the coastal city of Port Sudan, two officials said on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to brief the media.
The military didn’t officially comment on the crash.

However, one name that has cropped up to have been among those dead is that of military pilot Omran Mirghani, whose uncle, prominent Sudanese journalist Osman Mirghani, declared his nephew’s death on social media.

War-torn Sudan is notorious for plane crashes and a poor aviation safety record. In February this year, at least 46 people, including women and children, were killed when a military aircraft crashed in a densely populated area in Omdurman, the sister city of the capital, Khartoum.

 

In 2018, at least 19 people died when a small aircraft traveling from Juba to Yirol crashed. Similarly, in 2015, a Russian-built cargo plane carrying passengers crashed shortly after takeoff from Juba, killing dozens.

 

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As the country’s army remains engaged in a bloody conflict with its paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), such crashes bring huge setback to the military, especially after it lost control over el-Fasher in October, its last stronghold in the sprawling region of Darfur.

Earlier this week, it was also forced to pull out from the country’s largest oil processing facility in the central region of Kordofan.

The war in Sudan began in April 2023 over a power struggle between the military and the RSF, and has so far killed over 40,000 people – a figure human rights groups consider a significant undercount.

The fighting has been marked by atrocities, including mass rape and ethnically motivated killings that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially in the western region of Darfur, according to the United Nations and international rights groups.

The war has also created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and pushed parts of the country into famine.