The pilot and co-pilot — both of them Americans — were also killed, while the governor of Sud-Kivu province was also injured when the plane overshot the runway at Bukavu airport, the office said, identifying Kabila’s aide as Augustin Katumba Mwanke.
“There were three killed: two American crew members and one passenger,” Mwanke, a Bukavu airport official told AFP on condition of anonymity, adding that there were eight passengers on the aircraft.
Mwanke and the pilot “died on the spot,” a source at the presidency said.
The twin-engine Gulfstream 200 had flown in from the capital Kinshasa via Goma and apparently missed its landing at Bukavu airport, in the vast country’s east.
“It touched down only halfway down the runway and went skidding into a ditch beyond the runway. The plane is damaged,” the airport official said.
“The weather was good, I think (the pilot) might have misjudged the runway because (this is) the first time this crew was flying to Bukavu,” he added.
Finance Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo was in serious condition and Sud-Kivu Governor Marcellin Tshisambo had both legs fractured, the official said.
He said that Antoine Ghonda, a lawmaker who previously served as a roving ambassador for Kabila, was also among the injured.
Mwanke, 48, was considered Kabila’s eminence grise. He won re-election last year as an MP from southern Katanga for the ruling People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD) of which he was a co-founder.
He was criticised in a report by UN panel of experts as having used his leverage in Kinshasa to obtain substantial tax exemptions for a mining company of whose board he was a member.
The UN panel had recommended sanctions including travel bans, freezing personal assets and barring access to banking facilities against Mwanke and several other officials suspected of links to criminal cartels plundering the country’s mineral resources.
Tshisambo was a political adviser to Kabila before his election as Sud-Kivu governor in 2010.
Plane crashes are frequent in the DR Congo. Some 50 airlines operate in the vast central African country, all of which are on a European Union blacklist barring them from operating in the EU.