“I open my eyes, everything is red”: a witness recounts the crash of the DHL cargo plane, two Spaniards were on board, one of them died

Four people were on board the cargo plane from the logistics company DHL which crashed this Monday, November 25 morning upon landing at Vilnius airport (Lithuania). One of them lost his life in this dramatic accident. The three others were injured but there were no casualties on the ground according to authorities.

The cause of the accident remains unknown and nothing indicates so far that it was a case of sabotage. The aircraft was transporting “ordinary parcels”.

“We cannot dismiss the possibility of a terrorist act […] but at the moment we cannot make attributions or point fingers, because we do not have such information,” Lithuanian counterintelligence chief Darius Jauniskis told reporters.

In security camera footage, a plane can be seen descending behind a warehouse and then the night sky lighting up in red and orange colors, before a thick plume of black smoke appeared. Emergency services said the plane hit the ground, broke into several pieces and slid more than 100 meters.

Some debris crashed into a home. “In the recording of the conversation between the pilots and the tower, the pilots, until the last second, did not inform the tower of any incident,” said Marius Baranauskas, director of the national authority of the Lithuanian Air Force. “We need to examine the black boxes to find out what happened on the plane,” he added. DHL has launched its own investigation into the crash.

“We were afraid that the war had started”

“This sound was so strange, as if something was exploding. I opened my eyes, everything was red,” said a witness reported by the Lithuanian daily Kauno diena. Continuing: “I woke up my husband. Of course, we didn’t know it was a plane. We were immediately afraid that the war had started.”

The media specifies that the crew member who died is a Spaniard. The other three members are another Spaniard, a German and a Lithuanian.