Slovak military plane crash kills 42 (AP) Updated: 2006-01-20 14:08
A Slovak military plane carrying troops back from Kosovo crashed into a
mountainside in northeastern Hungary, killing at least 42 people, officials said
Friday.
Only one person survived after the AN-24 aircraft went down Thursday near the
Slovak border, said National Police spokesman Laszlo Garamvolgyi. The survivor
was taken to a hospital in the Slovak city of Kosice but there was no immediate
word on his condition.
Tibor Dobson, spokesman for Hungary's national catastrophe rescue service,
said there were 43 people on board the plane and that all but one died, based on
a passenger list provided by the Slovak Embassy in the Hungarian capital of
Budapest.
That included 35 passengers who all had some kind of military rank and eight
crew members, Dobson said.
Partial map of Europe highlighting Slovakia and Hungary.
[AFP] | But Garamvolgyi said there were 45 people on board and that 44 were killed.
The discrepancy could not be immediately explained.
A NATO officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not
authorized to speak on to the media, said in Kosovo that the plane was carrying
Slovak soldiers back home after serving in the NATO-led peacekeeping force.
Officials say Slovak troops help patrol the boundary between Kosovo and Serbia.
According to a statement from the local police, the plane cut off the tops of
trees along a 400-yard stretch before slamming into the mountainside. Air
traffic controllers lost sight of the aircraft just after 7:30 p.m. and
authorities began receiving reports of a crash from eyewitnesses shortly
thereafter.
"An initial inspection revealed that the airplane ... was not carrying
weapons, ammunition or explosives," the Borsod-Abauj-Zemplen County police said
in a statement.
Gergely Abraham, a spokesman for the Economic and Transport Ministry said the
area where the crash occurred about 155 miles northeast of Budapest was not
heavily populated, but did not provide other details.
Hungarian rescuers and fire crews were at the crash site, Hungarian Interior
Ministry spokesman Sandor Orodan said.
The Czech news agency CTK reported Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda had
called a late-night meeting with Cabinet ministers.
The agency also said the Slovak army sent a helicopter to the crash site, but
that it was unable to land because of bad weather.
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