ANKARA, 27 May 2003 — An airplane carrying Spanish peacekeepers crashed into a mountain in northeastern Turkey yesterday while on its third attempt to land in thick fog. All 74 people aboard were killed, officials said.
The plane was flying from Kabul to Zaragoza, Spain, with a refueling stop in the Black Sea port of Trabzon, the Spanish Defense Ministry said. Turkey’s Transportation Ministry said the plane had also made a stopover in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The Russian made YAK-42D hit a mountain slope near the town of Macka, 50 km (30 miles) south of Trabzon, according to Turkish officials.
The plane apparently went down in heavy fog while approaching Trabzon airport, Gov. Aslan Yildirim of Trabzon told the private CNN-Turk television station. He said the pilot reported not being able to see the runway in the first two attempts, and the plane disappeared from radar screens at 4:45 a.m.
The airplane, which belonged to a Ukrainian company named Ukrainian-Mediterranean Airlines, carried 62 passengers — all Spanish peacekeeping forces — and 12 crew members, the Turkish officials said. The dead on the plane included 41 army soldiers and 21 air force personnel, the Spanish Defense Ministry said.
The plane, which apparently carried ammunition belonging to the Spanish soldiers, burst into flames and exploded upon impact. Turkish soldiers saw unexploded hand grenades among the wreckage and evacuated the rescue site, fearing further explosions, CNN-Turk reported.
The Transportation Ministry said radio contact between the tower and the pilot was cut off just before the news of the crash reached the authorities.
Turkish soldiers retrieved more than 30 charred bodies from the wreckage, said Deputy Gov. Nihat Nalbant of Trabzon. Nalbant denied earlier reports that the plane’s black box flight recorder had been found. If found, the flight recorder could indicate whether there were any failures in the aircraft’s operations or its systems. “It will be very difficult to identify them,” Yildirim said. “Most bodies are in pieces or dismembered.”
Television footage showed a huge pile of twisted and burned metal covering a wide area. Reporters at the scene said diaries of soldiers, family pictures, music CDs and a half-burned camera were scattered among the debris. One witness, Sait Topcu, told CNN-Turk the plane was exploding in flames when he reached the site. “I had to wait 15-20 minutes for the explosions to end before I could get near it,” Topcu said.
The army troops were from an engineering regiment and had just finished a 4-month tour of duty, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported. It said until now, there had been no deaths among Spanish troops in the 17 months they had been involved in the Afghan peacekeeping mission.
The engineers had recently been working on a road to Kabul’s airport that would allow heavy fuel trucks easier access to the terminals, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Madrid said. The Spanish Air Force had also been working at Kabul’s airport.
