There is no indication that the plane crash in Vilnius could have been an act of sabotage, said the head of the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense, Laurynas Kasciunas. An international commission was established to investigate the causes of the disaster.
A SWIFT transport plane operating for DHL crashed on Monday in Vilnius, right next to the airport. The machine hit the ground and slid along it for about 100 meters. It broke into pieces and its pieces hit the house. Nothing happened to the residents. One of the four crew members died.
The Crisis Management Center initiated an investigation to explain the causes of the disaster. On Wednesday, the head of the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense, Laurynas Kasciunas, announced the preliminary results of the analysis. – There is no indication that Monday's crash of a cargo plane in Vilnius could have been an act of sabotage, he said.
– A preliminary visual analysis showed that the plane landing in Vilnius did not suffer any external damage. A detailed analysis of the black boxes will allow us to determine more precisely what could have happened inside the machine, Kascziunas told journalists after a meeting of the parliamentary committee on national security and defense.
He also reported that initial interviews with the surviving pilots indicate that there were no signs of distress, smoke or chaos on board. At the same time, he emphasized that investigators are not ruling out anything, but at the moment there are no grounds to believe that the plane crash was sabotage.
A transport plane crashed in Vilnius Reuters
– Before attempting to link this event to the activities of hostile states, irrefutable evidence is necessary. Otherwise, we risk that the aggressor will achieve his goal twice, said the Lithuanian minister.
“Irrefutable evidence is necessary”
An international commission was established to investigate the causes of the disaster. According to the Head of the National Crisis Management Center, Vilmantas Vitkauskas, it consists of investigators from Lithuania, German, Spain and USA. Experts inspect the accident site, then the plane wreck will be transported to the hangar, where it will be examined and compared with the data obtained from the black boxes.
On Tuesday, the Lithuanian government announced that the black boxes had already been recovered from the plane wreck.
A courier company plane crashed in Vilnius. The circumstances of the crash are under investigationJustyna Zuber/Fakty o Świecie TVN24 BiS
Main photo source: Reuters