One crew member is dead and three others hospitalized after a DHL cargo aircraft crashed on approach to the Vilnius International Airport in Lithuania.
The cargo flight was operated by Madrid based carrier Swiftair on behalf of DHL. It had taken off from Leipzig, Germany, and was scheduled to land in Vilnius.
The Boeing 737 crashed around 4:30 a.m. central European time (CET) on Monday as it tried to land at the airport, exploding into a fireball after it ploughed into the courtyard of a house, according to Lithuanian officials.
Thirteen residents were evacuated from a building near the crash site without injuries, authorities said.
German logistics company DHL said the cargo aircraft was making an “emergency landing” in Vilnius.
“We can confirm that today, at approximately 4:30 am CET, a Swiftair aircraft, operated by a service partner on behalf of DHL, performed an emergency landing about about half a mile from VNO Airport while en route from Leipzig, Germany to VNO Airport,” DHL said in a statement to CBS.
Lithuanian counter-intelligence chief Darius Jauniskis told reporters during a news conference Monday that officials are investigating the cause of the crash and have not ruled out sabotage, CBS and others reported.
“We cannot reject the possibility of terrorism. We have warned that such things are possible, we see an increasingly aggressive Russia … but at the moment we can’t make attributions or point fingers, because we don’t have such information,” Jauniskis said.
Western security officials have said that incendiary devices that ignited on planes in Germany and the United Kingdom in July were part of a covert Russian operation that aimed to start fires aboard cargo and passenger flights heading to the U.S. and Canada, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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