Ten die in Angolan plane crash

LISBON (Reuters) - A light aircraft crashed into a mountain near the Angolan city of Huambo on Saturday killing all ten people on board, Portugal's Lusa news agency said on Saturday.

Lusa cited a source close to the Angolan government as saying two of the victims were Portuguese. The head of Angola's national aviation centre, Celso Rosas, told Lusa that bad weather may have caused the airplane to crash.

The airplane belonged to a company that operates chartered flights in Angola, a former Portuguese colony in southwest Africa.

The Beechcraft King Air B200 twin-propeller left Luanda, the capital, at about 1 a.m. EST and was headed for Huambo, a city approximately 450 km (280 miles) to the south-east.

The country's worst recent year for air accidents occurred in 2000, when two separate crashes claimed 87 lives in one month.

Last year, a Boeing 737 belonging to Angola's state TAAG airline crashed in the northern city of M'banza Congo, killing at least six people and badly injuring others.

(Reporting by Henrique Almeida, editing by Matthew Jones)