An Islamist official in Libya’s government and 10 other passengers and crew were killed when a military plane carrying medical patients crashed near Tunisia’s capital early yesterday, officials said.

The Libyan Antonov aircraft went down after the pilot tried to land in farmland near Grombalia town south of Tunis, Tunisia’s TAP state news agency reported.

Sheikh Meftah Daouadi, undersecretary at the Libyan Ministry of Martyrs which looks after the families of fighters that were killed in Libya’s 2011 revolution, was among the dead, said a spokesman for his organisation, the Operations Room for Libyan Revolutionaries.

The veteran Islamist fighter took part in the revolt against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. However, it was unclear whether Sheikh Daouadi was a patient or was on the plane accompanying one of the other passengers.

Veteran Libyan Islamist fighter among the dead

Meanwhile a spokesman for Tunisia’s defence ministry said that crew members as well as the patients and their companions died. Libyans often travel to Tunisia for medical treatment.

Tunisia’s TNN channel showed images of Tunisian firefighters dosing the flames at the site of the wreckage of the gutted Libyan aircraft before dawn yesterday.

It was the second crash involving a military plane in North Africa in two weeks.

An Algerian military transport plane crashed into a mountain in bad weather on February 11, killing 77 people, in that country’s worst air disaster in a decade.