A Nigerian military aircraft carrying 32 people crashed in the southwest of the country on its way to Lagos, government officials said on Monday. They gave no immediate confirmation of casualties.
The aircraft, which included 25 passengers and seven crew members, was on a “routine mission” on Monday morning from Benin City in southern Nigeria, officials said. But shortly after losing contact with air traffic control, it crashed in the coastal Ondo State.
Wreckage was later found in a town near a naval base, according to Nigeria’s aviation minister, Festus Keyamo. Emergency responders arrived on the scene on speedboats to search the creeks for victims. By late in the day, they were yet to find any survivors.
Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, expressed “profound sadness” over the crash and ordered an investigation. “This is a painful moment for our armed forces and for the entire nation,” he said in a statement.
“I have directed the Nigerian Air Force to immediately commence a thorough investigation into the cause of the crash,” he added.
The air force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The crash is one of Nigeria’s worst military aviation accidents in years — and the latest in a long history of such incidents. In the aftermath of those accidents, despite promises of an investigation, few details were released. Experts have regularly blamed poor maintenance of aircraft and operational failings.
In 2021, the leader of the Nigerian Army and 10 others were killed when a military aircraft crashed in northern Nigeria. An investigation into the cause of that accident was never released.
There have been more than a dozen air crashes over the last decade in Nigeria, according to estimates by local media.
In recent years, the air force has played an increasing role in counterterrorism missions against militant and jihadist groups in Nigeria. After a fatal military aircraft crash in 2022, Nigeria’s minister of defense at the time, Bashir Magashi, warned that such accidents risked weakening the force’s capacity to respond to rising threats.
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