DHL plane crash in Lithuania kills at least 1 person
Lithuanian police chief says that terrorism "cannot be ruled out" as probe begins.
A DHL cargo plane flying from Leipzig, Germany, to Lithuania crashed into a building in Vilnius early Monday morning, killing one of the four people on board.
A major probe started Monday morning into the cause of the crash, with one senior Lithuanian law enforcement official saying that terrorism “cannot be ruled out,” amid growing fears of Russian covert operations across the European continent.
The two-story building was located 1.3 kilometers north of the airport, but its 13 residents were evacuated. Vilnius Mayor Valdas Benkunskas said the other three members of the flight crew were hospitalized.
“Today we will urgently declare a state of emergency in the area to ensure that the consequences of the incident are dealt with quickly — the area is cleaned up, hazardous materials are collected,” Benkunskas wrote in a Facebook post.
Mindaugas Pivorūnas, CEO of DHL Lithuania, told public service broadcaster LRT that the cause of the Boeing 737-476(SF)’s accident was not yet clear.
According to a spokesperson for Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre, the cause of the crash is being investigated as related to “technical problems.”
Lithuanian police chief Arūnas Paulauskas also said the crash was “most likely due to a technical fault or human error,” but added that terrorism “cannot be ruled out.”
“This is one of the versions of the crash that will be investigated and checked. There is a lot of work to be done. Gathering evidence may take all week, there will be no quick answers,” Paulauskas said.
Earlier this year, two self-igniting mechanisms shipped from Lithuania via DHL caused fires at a logistics centre in Leipzig, with Western security officials eyeing Russia over that incident, according to reports.
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