A DHL cargo plane flying from Germany to Lithuania crashed while making an emergency landing Monday morning near Vilnius airport.
All four crew members were found and one was pronounced dead.
Authorities who have opened an investigation are not yet ruling out any reason for the crash, including an act of terrorism.
A DHL cargo plane connecting Germany and Lithuania crashed while making an emergency landing this Monday morning near the airport in Vilnius. “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 the press. “All four crew members have been found. Unfortunately, one of them was pronounced dead”he indicated. “There were four crew members: two Spaniards, a German and a Lithuanian”Julija Samorokovskaja, a spokesperson for the Vilnius police, told AFP. “One of the Spaniards was killed”while the injured were hospitalized.
Authorities who have opened an investigation are not yet ruling out any reason for the crash, including an act of terrorism. “It is premature to associate it (the crash) with anything”Darius Jauniskis, head of Lithuanian intelligence services, told the press. “We are working with our foreign partners to obtain all possible information. We cannot rule out the possibility of a terrorist act,” he said.
During the crash, followed by a fire, a house caught fire. The authorities specified that all residents had been evacuated safely. According to a press release from DHL Germany, the plane which linked Leipzig in Germany to the Lithuanian capital “made an emergency landing about a kilometer away” from Vilnius airport. The accident occurred around 03:30 GMT. According to Ausra Rutkauskiene, a company official in Lithuania, the plane was carrying “shipments from various customers” and not just one.
“An increasingly aggressive Russia”
“We have warned that such things are possible, we see an increasingly aggressive Russia, (…) but we cannot yet (…) point fingers at people”further affirmed Darius Jauniskis.
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. “We need to neutralize and dismantle the source, and we know who is behind these operations. It is Russian military intelligence.”declared Kestutis Budrys.
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 in July.
