A DHL cargo plane flying from Germany to Lithuania crashed while making an emergency landing Monday morning near Vilnius airport, with authorities remaining cautious about the causes of the accident, while not excluding the possibility of a “terrorist act”.
“The plane was supposed to land at Vilnius airport and crashed a few kilometers from the airport,” Renatas Pozela, head of the fire and rescue service, told reporters.
“There were four crew members: two Spaniards, a German and a Lithuanian,” Julija Samorokovskaja, a spokeswoman for the Vilnius police, told AFP. “One of the Spaniards was killed,” while the wounded were hospitalized.
The condition of one of the injured “is very serious”, said Jurgita Juozaityte Markeviciene, a spokesperson for Vilnius University Hospital, refusing to specify his nationality.
According to DHL Germany, the Swift Air plane, operated on behalf of DHL and which linked Leipzig (Germany) to the Lithuanian capital, “made an emergency landing approximately one kilometer” from Vilnius airport.
The accident occurred around 5:30 a.m. local time (03:30 GMT).
According to Ausra Rutkauskiene, a company official in Lithuania, the plane, a Boeing 737, was carrying “shipments from several customers” and not just one.
During the crash, followed by a fire, an apartment building caught fire. The authorities specified that all residents had been evacuated safely.
An AFP photographer present on site was able to see the wreckage of the aircraft and the house, as well as dozens of packages scattered on the ground.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda visited the site on Monday, according to photos taken by the Baltic news agency BNS.
“We were woken up by the sound of an explosion. Through the window we saw the wave of explosion and a cloud of fire,” Stanislovas Jakimavicius, 65, who lives 300 meters away, told AFP. meters from the crash zone.
“Like fireworks (…) Everything then burned with a lot of smoke,” he added.
– Investigation –
The authorities, who have opened an investigation, remain cautious about the causes of the crash, while not ruling out a terrorist act.
Outgoing Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte called in a message published on Facebook to “refrain from drawing hasty conclusions”, despite “the current geopolitical context”.
Darius Jauniskis, the head of the Lithuanian intelligence services, also felt that it was “premature to associate (the crash) with anything”, while indicating that he could not “exclude the possibility of a terrorist act.
“We warned that such things were possible, we see an increasingly aggressive Russia, (…) but we cannot yet (…) point the finger” at anyone, Mr. Jauniskis further declared, while the Minister of Defense indicated that there were so far “no signs or evidence to suggest that this was sabotage or a terrorist act”.
Investigators went to the hospital to interview the injured crew members, while the plane's black boxes must be analyzed to determine whether it was “a technical error, a pilot error or something else.
A German Transport Ministry official said Berlin “will support the on-site investigation.”
“No information can currently be given on the cause of the crash,” added the ministry spokesperson.
– Incendiary packages –
At the beginning of November, several people were arrested in Lithuania and Poland in a case of incendiary packages sent by plane to different European countries, the traces of which could, according to several capitals, lead to Russia.
This summer, packages containing incendiary devices were found in DHL warehouses in Germany and 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.
“We need to neutralize and dismantle the source, and we know who is behind these operations. It is the Russian military intelligence services,” Kestutis Budrys said.
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”, referring to the case of a package that had caught fire at a center of the carrier DHL in Leipzig in July.
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