Boufarik airbase killing 257 people, mostly army personnel and members of their families
Boufarik
(Algeria) (AFP) - Algeria suffered its deadliest ever air catastrophe
Wednesday when a military plane crashed after takeoff, killing 257
people on board, mostly army personnel and their family members.
An
AFP photographer at the scene saw the charred wreckage of the plane
after it caught fire in a field near the Boufarik airbase, 30 kilometres
(19 miles) south of Algiers.
Hundreds
of ambulances and dozens of fire trucks with sirens wailing rushed to
the scene of the crash, in an uninhabited area where one person was
injured on the ground by debris.
Firefighters extinguished the blaze and security forces set up a cordon to prevent journalists and onlookers from approaching.
Witnesses who had been working in nearby fields told AFP that the plane had burst into flames before it hit the ground.
The
defence ministry said in a statement that 247 passengers and 10 crew
were killed without mentioning any survivors. Most of those on board
were army members and their families, it said.
There
was no immediate word on the cause of the crash. Deputy Defence
Minister General Ahmed Gaid Salah visited the site and ordered an
investigation, the defence ministry said.
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika declared three days of national mourning over the crash starting Wednesday.
The
veteran leader also ordered that a special prayer be said for the
victims after weekly Muslim prayers on Friday, a decree published by
state press agency APS said.
The Ilyushin IL-76 transport plane was bound for Tindouf in southwest Algeria near the borders with Morocco and Western Sahara.
The
Tindouf region is home to refugees from Western Sahara and houses the
administrative offices of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic declared
in 1976 by the Algiers-backed Polisario Front which seeks independence
for the disputed region.
Among
the victims of the plane crash were 30 Sahrawis, "the sick and their
companions, men, women and children, who had been returning from
treatment in Algeria", said the Polisario.
Rabat considers Western Sahara an integral part of Morocco and proposes autonomy for the resource-rich territory.
According
to the plane manufacturer's website, the IL-76, a four-engine plane
built in the Soviet Union and then Russia, can transport between 126 and
225 passengers depending on the model and configuration.
The
North African country has suffered a string of military and civilian
aviation disasters but Wednesday's was Algeria's deadliest ever plane
crash and the world's fourth costliest in human lives in 20 years.
- History of disasters -
Two
Algerian military planes collided mid-flight in December 2012 during a
training exercise in Tlemcen, in the far west of the country, killing
the pilots of both planes.
In
February 2014, 77 people died when a military plane carrying army
personnel and family members crashed between Tamanrasset in southern
Algeria and the eastern city of Constantine.
Only one person survived after the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft came down in the mountainous Oum El Bouaghi region.
The defence ministry blamed that crash on bad weather.
An
Air Algerie passenger plane flying from Burkina Faso to Algiers crashed
in northern Mali in July 2014, killing all 116 people on board
including 54 French nationals.
In
October the same year, a military plane crashed in the south of the
country during a training exercise, killing the two men on board.
That
came more than a decade after all but one of the 103 people on an Air
Algerie Boeing 737-200 died in March 2003 when it crashed on takeoff in
the country's south after an engine caught fire.
Comments
Post a Comment