Quote:A Kenya Airways plane with 114 people on board, including five Britons, has crashed in the dense forests of southern Cameroon. The almost brand new Boeing 737-800 was reported missing shortly after taking off in poor weather late on Friday night from Douala, the largest city in Cameroon, en route to Nairobi. Kenya Airways officials said yesterday that a distress signal had been picked up, but that wreckage had not been found. People living in several of the villages dotted through the forests of the sparsely populated area have reported hearing a loud boom.

Earlier the airline confirmed that five Britons were among the passengers, who also included nationals of 22 countries. The Foreign Office would not confirm the missing Britons' identities and said there was confusion over passport numbers which might not have been properly recorded in Cameroon. But Associated Press has said that its correspondent, Anthony Mitchell, a former Daily Express reporter now working for the news agency, was aboard the plane.

Mitchell, originally from London, was flying home from an assignment in the Central African Republic to Nairobi, where he lives with his English wife Catherine, and their young son and baby daughter. He called his family shortly before boarding the flight to say it had been delayed by an hour due to a rainstorm. Chris Tomlinson, Nairobi bureau chief for Associated Press, said: 'Wee are hoping against hope that Anthony is OK.'

African airlines have a notoriously poor safety record, but Kenya Airways was regarded as one of the best on the continent. Partly owned by Air France-KLM, it has excellent links across Africa and a good safety record. The airline's last major accident was in 2000, when 169 passengers died after its plane crashed after take-off in Abidjan, Ivory Coast - the same airport from which flight KQ507 took off on Friday, before stopping in Cameroon. Take-off in Douala was delayed for an hour.

At a news conference in Nairobi, Titus Naikuni, group managing director of Kenya Airways, said: 'The last message was received in Douala after take-off and thereafter the tower was unable to contact the plane.' He said that the plane was just six months old and low-flying spotter aircraft were searching a densely forested area 62 miles south-west of Yaounde, Cameroon's capital.

Most of the passengers, who included 34 Cameroonians, 15 Indians and seven South Africans, were scheduled to catch onward flights from Nairobi. Kenyan transport minister Chirau Ali Mwakwere said the US was assisting in the search by providing satellite images of the flight path. He said it was too early to determine the cause of the accident.

Friends and colleagues of Mr Mitchell in Nairobi and in the UK were preparing for the worst last night. Prior to working in Nairobi, he had worked in Ethiopia, where his wife was an aid worker for Save the Children. He moved to Kenya after being expelled by the Ethiopian government for what it considered unfavourable reporting.

In Kenya he soon earned a reputation as a sharp reporter, who was always generous with information to his colleagues. He and his wife were apparently planning to return to England in the near future. Greg Swift, deputy news editor of the Express, said: 'He is a really old-fashioned journalist who can pin down a story with intelligence and determination. He is well known for dry, laconic wit.'

Rosie Boycott, who was editor of the Express during Mitchell's time there, said: 'Anthony is an enormous talent. He is a wonderful guy. He made a huge contribution to the paper.'

Crash theories

David Learmount, operations and safety editor at Flight International magazine, said the most likely cause of the crash was weather and the 'most puzzling thing' was why the pilot did not use the weather warning radar system on board to avoid a tropical storm.

Other possible causes could be: engineering failure, but from a cruising altitude a plane stands a good chance of gliding to land; mid-air collision, but there are no other planes reported missing; or terrorism, but Kenya Airways is not a high-risk target. Three recent high-profile air crashes over Africa, a Russian airliner over northern Ukraine and an Indonesian aircraft have all been blamed on weather. 'Everything else is so unlikely,' said Learmount. 'The next question would be why?'