VILNIUS, (Reuters) – A DHL DHLn.DE cargo plane crashed as it came in to land at Lithuania’s Vilnius airport early this morning, killing one person on the aircraft and with some debris damaging a house.
The three other people onboard were injured but no one on the ground was hurt, officials said. Flames and smoke engulfed the crashed plane as fire crews worked to extinguish the blaze.
The scheduled flight was operated by airline Swiftair on behalf of DHL and had taken off from Leipzig, Germany.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known and officials said there was no indication so far that it might be a case of sabotage, although Germany is investigating several fires caused by incendiary devices hidden inside parcels at a warehouse in Leipzig for delivery by DHL earlier this year.
Lithuanian counter-intelligence chief Darius Jauniskis told reporters: “We cannot reject the possibility of terrorism…but at the moment we can’t make attributions or point fingers, because we don’t have such information.”
The Boeing 737-400 BA.N crashed around 0330 GMT while approaching Vilnius airport for landing, a spokesperson for Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Center said. The flight had departed from Leipzig at 0208 GMT, Flightradar24 said.
Security camera footage showed an aircraft descending behind a warehouse after which the night sky was lit up in bright red and orange colours followed by plumes of thick dark smoke.
Rescue services said the plane hit the ground, split into pieces and slid over 100 metres (110 yards). Some debris hit a house.
“In the recording of the conversation between the pilots and the tower, the pilots, until the very last second did not tell the tower of any extraordinary event,” said Marius Baranauskas, head of the Lithuanian National Aviation Authority.
“We need to examine the black boxes to know what was happening in the aircraft,” he said.
Lithuanian police and prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into the incident, and a specialised unit in the Justice Ministry will carry out a civil aviation incident probe, the government said.
“Only these investigations will answer questions on the real reasons of the incident, speculations and guesses will really not help to determine the truth”, Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said in a statement.
REGULAR PARCELS
A Lithuanian police spokesperson said one person onboard, a Spanish citizen, was killed and three others – Spanish, German and Lithuanian citizens – were injured.
Police told a press conference 12 people had been evacuated from the house hit by debris. There were no casualties on the ground.
Firefighters poured water onto the smoking building some 1.3 km (0.8 mile) north of the airport runway and nearby streets were cordoned off.
DHL has launched its own investigation into the crash, a spokesperson for the company’s Lithuanian arm told Reuters.
“The aircraft contained regular parcels. We do not have any information that any of them were suspicious,” she said.
A European Union Aviation Safety Agency spokesperson said it was too early to comment on the causes of the crash.
The 737-400 aircraft involved in the accident was 31 years old, according to a Flightradar24 database. Boeing was working to gather more information and would provide any support, a Boeing spokesperson said.
Swiftair declined to comment.
German security authorities are also investigating the crash and are in close contact with domestic and foreign authorities, a security source said.
Germany is already investigating several fires caused by incendiary devices hidden inside parcels at a warehouse in Leipzig earlier this year.
British police are investigating a warehouse fire in Birmingham in July, caused by a package catching alight, and liaising with other European law enforcement agencies to see if there was a connection with similar incidents elsewhere.
Security officials have told Reuters parcels that exploded at logistics depots in Europe were part of a test run for a Russian plot to trigger explosions on cargo flights to the United States.
Leipzig Airport operator Mitteldeutsche Flughafen AG declined to comment on the crash.
