Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga sign a power-sharing agreement in Nairobi. Photograph: Jerome Delay/AP
Two members of the Kenyan government were killed, along with two other people, when a small plane crashed near the Masai Mara game reserve in the south-west of the country, the president, Mwai Kibaki, said today.
The roads minister, Kipkalya Kones, 56, and Lorna Laboso, 47, an assistant home affairs minister, were aboard the plane with a pilot and a security guard, Kibaki said in a statement.
"The wreckage has been found and there are no survivors … Our country has lost leaders of immense potential at their prime age and with a promising future."
The president said flags would fly at half mast until the two lawmakers were buried.
The spokesman for Prime Minister Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement party, Salim Lone, described the news as "unbearable".
Patrick Wambani, the police chief of Narok district, told Reuters: "The plane came down on an unoccupied house and disintegrated, killing all four occupants."
There was no immediate confirmation of the cause of the crash.
The plane went down in Narok, about 75 miles from the capital, Nairobi, according to Kenya's Civil Aviation Authority.
Kones is a five-term lawmaker whose appointment to the cabinet was part of the power-sharing deal struck between Kibaki and Odinga when violence broke out after contested elections at the end of last year.
Laboso, a new lawmaker, was one of only a few women elected to Kenya's national assembly.
In 2003, a plane carrying four cabinet ministers crashed in western Kenya, killing one minister and the two pilots.
A public inquiry subsequently recommended that no more than three cabinet ministers or senior government officials should travel on the same flight, for security reasons.
The report also said many airstrips in the country were poorly maintained, and the government had allocated insufficient money for their repair and maintenance.
In 2006, two assistant cabinet ministers and two lawmakers were among more than a dozen people who died when a military plane crashed while trying to land during bad weather
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