Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania (AFP) – An aircraft crash on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania has claimed the lives of four tourists and left the pilot seriously injured.

The Kenyan-registered plane was flying over Africa’s highest peak, Kilimanjaro regional police commander Lucas Ngh’oboko said.

“We have yet to determine the nationalities of the dead, but they were whites and two of them were women.

“The aircraft has Kenyan registration numbers and so far we don’t know what it was doing in the area.”

Rescuers and wardens from the Kilimanjaro National Park Authority collected remains from the accident scene and took the injured pilot to a hospital in nearby Moshi.

Ngh’oboko said the six-seater Cessna 206 crashed near Kilimanjaro’s Mawenzi peak, 4 330 metres above sea level. At 5 963 metres, Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest mountain.

Police said Tanzanian civil aviation detectives were probing the cause of the accident and trying to establish the identities of the victims.

In June 2006, three American mountain climbers died when they were struck by a cascade of falling rocks and boulders dislodged by strong wind on Kilimanjaro.

The spectacular mountain, which is near Tanzania’s border with Kenya, attracts thousands of tourists a year.

Scientists have long warned that global warming has degraded the snow and glaciers on the mountain, immortalised in Ernest Hemingway’s 1938 short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro and later by a Hollywood film version of the title.