Prince Harry tours Angola minefields

Prince Harry is "irritated" about the failure by some nations to help remove landmines from African countries, the Halo Trust landmine clearance charity revealed on Saturday.

The charity said the prince travelled to Angola last week, where he visited the town of Cuito Cuanavale, which saw heavy fighting during the southern African nation's 1975-2002 civil war.

The group said he toured minefields and met beneficiaries of the work carried out by the group, of which the 28-year-old royal is a patron.

Harry was accompanied on his Angola trip by Halo's chief executive, Guy Willoughby, who told Sky News on Saturday that the prince had a "bee in his bonnet" about the lack of progress on the issue of landmine clearance in some areas of Africa.

"He is irritated that the countries which supplied these landmines are not actually putting in any funds to clear them, 25 years on," the charity chief said.

It's was not the first time the prince visited a Halo clearance site he toured minefields in Mozambique in 2010.

But by travelling to Angola, he was following in the footsteps of his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who visited minefields in that nation in 1997 to draw global attention to the Halo Trust's efforts to clear them.

During her visit, Princess Diana called for an international ban on landmines, sparking criticism that she was meddling in a political issue, with one junior minister describing her as a "loose cannon".

Willoughby said he didn't know if the prince's visit would spark the same kind of controversy, but added that the landmine problem was too big to be ignored.

"Unless one can get more de-miners, it will take in Angola another 18 or 19 years" to clear the deadly legacy of the civil war, he explained.

In a statement, Kensington Palace said Harry was pleased to see the progress Halo had made and that he was keen to continue supporting its work.

The group began clearing mines in Cuito Cuanavale about three years after the end of the war and has so far located and destroyed more than 21,300 mines.