Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon.
dunno if anyone has posted this up already. i did a search for it, was unable to find it.
Apparently many of the deceased were aid workers.
UN staff die in S Leone air crash
All 24 people on board a United Nations helicopter are dead after it crashed in eastern Sierra Leone, UN officials say.
The bodies of all the victims were later found at the site of the crash, near the town of Yengema.
There were three Russian crew and 21 passengers on board, many of them aid workers.
The Russian-built Mi-8 helicopter was carrying members of the UN peacekeeping mission and had taken off from the capital Freetown, bound for Yengema.
At least 14 of the passengers were Pakistani nationals, and there were thought to be one Bangladeshi policeman and two non-UN civilian staff also on board.
There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash.
The UN has deployed about 11,000 peacekeepers in Sierra Leone since the country’s 1991-2002 civil war. There have been no known attacks on UN officials since the fighting stopped.
A search mission for the aircraft was despatched after radio contact was lost. The burning wreckage was found in dense forest on the side of a mountain. Russian media say UT Air, the charter company which owned the helicopter, is a major player in the air charter industry with 301 available aircraft. It carried a total of 1.5 million passengers in 2003.
It has frequently been used by the UN in peacekeeping operations in East Timor, DR Congo and Eritrea as well as Sierra Leone.