‘We could have found them that day’: Witness claims delay cost lives in Chilima crash

A community witness caught up in the investigation into the plane crash that killed Malawi’s former vice-president Saulos Chilima has made the astonishing revelation that he was wrongly accused of being involved in the tragedy — with some people even claiming he himself had died in the crash.

Colred Nkosi told the Parliamentary Ad-hoc Committee probing the June 10, 2024 disaster that he became the target of vicious rumours in the aftermath of the crash, which killed Chilima and eight others.

“Some people went as far as claiming that I had been killed in the crash,” Nkosi told stunned committee members, laying bare the extent of the misinformation swirling around the tragedy.

He revealed that fraudsters had gone as far as doctoring photographs linked to the disaster and flooding social media with the doctored images, fuelling confusion and distress at an already devastating time for the nation.

Furious over the exploitation of the tragedy, Nkosi condemned the misuse of social media platforms and demanded that authorities, including the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA), step in and take decisive action against those responsible.

Nkosi, who lives in Kasangazi near the Nthungwa crash site, separately told the committee he had spotted the aircraft from his garden on the morning of June 10, 2024, describing how it roared loudly and circled the area before vanishing from his sight.

He said that when word spread later that day that the plane had gone missing, residents desperately phoned several officials to report what they had witnessed — but claimed that despite alerting rescue teams to the area where they believed the aircraft had gone down, authorities instead continued searching elsewhere.

“I think we could have found these people on the very day the accident happened,” he said, voicing frustration at the delayed response.

Nkosi also suggested that political divisions may have contributed to the delay in locating the wreckage and rescuing those on board — raising fresh questions over how the search operation was handled in the critical hours after the crash.