A DHL cargo plane connecting Germany and Lithuania crashed while making an emergency landing this Monday morning near the airport in Vilnius. The authorities do not exclude the possibility of a criminal act.
“The plane was supposed to land at Vilnius airport and crashed a few kilometers from the airport,” said Renatas Pozela, head of the fire and rescue service. “All four crew members have been found. Unfortunately, one of them was pronounced dead,” he said. The accident occurred around 4:30 a.m. (Paris time).
An open investigation
During the crash, followed by a fire, a house caught fire. The authorities specified that all residents had been evacuated safely. According to Ausra Rutkauskiene, a DHL company manager in Lithuania, the plane was carrying “consignments from various customers” and not just one.
The authorities, who have opened an investigation, have not yet ruled out any reason for the crash. “It is premature to associate it (the crash) with anything,” said Darius Jauniskis, head of Lithuanian intelligence services. “We are working with our foreign partners to obtain all possible information. We cannot rule out the possibility of a terrorist act,” he said.
“We warned that such things were possible, we see an increasingly aggressive Russia, (…) but we cannot yet (…) point the finger at people,” Darius Jauniskis further declared. At the beginning of November, several people were arrested in Lithuania and Poland in the case of incendiary packages sent by plane to different European countries.
Incendiary packages
This summer, packages containing incendiary devices were found in the warehouses of the logistics group DHL in Germany and Great Britain, where they caught fire. In Poland, a package also set fire to a DHL truck, according to the daily Gazeta Wyborcza.
An adviser to the Lithuanian president for national security then attributed this operation to Russia. German intelligence had previously also pointed the finger at the Russian Federation. On October 14 during a hearing in the Bundestag, the head of German Domestic Intelligence (BfV) Thomas Haldenwang openly accused Moscow of being behind the “DHL affair”, particularly in the case of a package that caught fire at a DHL carrier center in Leipzig (east) in July.
