Painstaking process to retrieve bodies

CANBERRA - Engineers will need to carve a road through rugged, heavily forested mountains to retrieve the bodies of the six Australian mining executives killed in a plane crash in the west African nation of Congo.

Further complicated by diplomacy, their families might have to wait weeks for the return of the entire Sundance Resources board.

The wreckage of the CASA-C212 turboprop chartered by Sundance at the weekend was found late on Monday night on the western slopes of Congo's Avima mountain range.

On board were billionaire miner Ken Talbot, one of Australia's richest men, and Sundance executives who had been flying from Cameroon to inspect an iron ore mine being developed near Yangadou, in Congo.

With him were chairman Geoff Wedlock, chief executive Don Lewis, company secretary John Carr-Gregg, directors John Jones and Craig Oliver, and Talbot employee Natasha Flason, a French citizen living in Queensland.

Also killed were Jeff Duff, an American working as a consultant for Sundance, a British passenger, and the French and British pilots.

The wreckage of the Aero-Services aircraft was found by a Sundance helicopter carrying a French military team, who secured the area and later stayed with the bodies as night fell.

The company now faces a potentially long and difficult process to bring the bodies back to Australia.

Sundance said yesterday it would start making a road through the forest from its Avima mining camp, about 10km distant, which could take a week or more to complete.

Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said families and friends needed to brace themselves for a long and painstaking process.

"It will take longer than the families would wish to repatriate the bodies," he told ABC radio.

"We've got two countries that we need to deal with - Cameroon, where the plane took off from, and Congo, where the plane crashed. And we've also got not just Australian citizens, but [citizens of] France, the United Kingdom and the United States."