DHL plane crash was not sabotage, Lithuanian defense minister advises

Monday’s cargo plane crash in Vilnius was not due to sabotage, Lithuanian Defense Minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas said.

“With all that we have now and what we know, there are no signs that there could be an act of sabotage,” Kasčiūnas told reporters on Wednesday at the Lithuanian parliament.

A DHL cargo plane flying from Leipzig, Germany to Lithuania hit a building in Vilnius and exploded early Monday morning, killing a crew member and injuring three others.

Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Center, added that a preliminary investigation had indicated the crash was likely caused by a technical malfunction.

Kasčiūnas said visual analysis showed the plane was not impacted externally on its descent for landing and that interviews with surviving crew members did not suggest anything unusual had been going on inside the aircraft.

He warned against linking the incident with a hostile act before all the facts are known.

“If attribution goes to a hostile country, then that attribution must be accurate, detailed [and] verified,” the minister said, adding that while nothing can be ruled out, he currently has no further information.

At the same time, Lithuania’s Commissioner General of Police Arūnas Paulauskas said terrorism “cannot be ruled out.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also said earlier that the plane crash could have been due to sabotage.

With the security climate in Europe already tense following the cutting of telecoms cables in the Baltic Sea earlier this month, the DHL crash has led to a major probe into its origins.

The downed aircraft’s black boxes will be sent to Germany for decryption, as Lithuania doesn’t have a lab capable of analyzing the data.