Cargo plane crashes in Lake Victoria

ENTEBBE, Uganda (Reuters) - An Antonov cargo plane en route to Somalia crashed into Lake Victoria on Monday after taking off from Uganda's main airport with 11 people on board, including three Burundian military officers.

Seven of those on board were confirmed dead, and an aviation source said he feared all 11 had been killed. "It plunged into the lake and went down deep," the source said.

Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Ignatius Igundura said there were four crew and seven passengers on board the aircraft when it crashed. "The rescue is on right now," he said.

A Reuters photographer at the scene saw wreckage and divers searching the lake, but no bodies.

A Burundi army spokesman confirmed three of its soldiers -- a brigadier general, a colonel and a captain -- had died.

"The information we have is that the plane crashed five minutes after taking off at Entebbe Airport. Burundi deplores the death of three of its officers who were on the plane," Adolphe Manirakiza told Reuters in Bujumbura.

There was no immediate word on what caused the crash.

Russian media said the pilot and co-pilot were Russian citizens and the navigator and flight engineer were Ukrainians. All four were killed in the crash, Ruslan Madiyev, an official at the Russian embassy in Kampala, told RIA news agency.

An Ugandan army official said the chartered aircraft was flying to Somalia and was carrying one Ugandan soldier as well as food supplies. Kampala and Bujumbura both contribute soldiers to a small African Union peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu.

Africa's air accident rate is six times worse than the rest of the world, the International Air Transport Association says.

(Additional reporting by Jack Kimball in Kampala, Frank Nyakairu in Nairobi, Patrick Nduwimana in Bujumbura and Amie Ferris-Rotman in Moscow; editing by Daniel Wallis, Tim Pearce)