Details of the incident were sketchy but those killed were tourists whose Kenyan-registered plane was flying over Africa's highest peak, Kilimanjaro Regional Police Commander Lucas Ngh'oboko told AFP.

"We are yet to determine the nationalities of the deceased, but they were all whites and two of them were women," he said.

"The aircraft has Kenyan registration numbers and so far, we don't know what it was doing in the area."

Ngh'oboko said the crash occurred near Kilimanjaro's Mawenzi peak, 4,330 metres above the sea level. Kilimanjaro, which stands at 5,963 metres (19,563 feet), is Africa's highest mountain.

The six-seater Cessna 206 aircraft crashed on Mawenzi -- one of the mountain's three peaks -- at about 1100 am (0700 GMT), officials said.

Ngh'oboko said rescuers and wardens from the Kilimanjaro National Park Authority collected remains from the accident scene and also took the injured pilot to a nearby hospital in Moshi, a township at the base of the mountain.

Police said Tanzanian civil aviation detectives were probing the cause of the accident, details on the aircraft and the identities of the dead.

In June 2006, three American mountain climbers were killed by a cascade of falling rocks and boulders dislodged by a strong gust of wind on Kilimanjaro.

The mountain, which sits near Tanzania's border with Kenya, provides one of Africa's most stunning panoramas with its views of wildlife-rich plains below, and thousands of climbing enthusiasts trek up its steep slopes every year.

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

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