257 dead in Algeria’s worst crash
Cause of plane crash not known; most victims Army officials
Boufarik ( Algeria), April 11: Algeria suffered its deadliest ever air catastrophe Wednesday when a military plane crashed near the capital, killing 257 people on board, mostly Army personnel and their family members, officials said.
The incident happened shortly after the aircraft took off from Boufarik military airport near the capital Algiers in the morning. The defence ministry said in a statement that 247 passengers, mostly Army personnel and their family members, and 10 crew were killed without mentioning any survivors.
It is not yet clear what caused the crash.
The Army’s chief of staff, who visited the crash site to inspect the wreckage along with the vice- minister of defence, has ordered an investigation into the crash
Video taken close to the crash site and published by a local news site showed a plume of black smoke billowing into the air. Pictures showed the burnt- out tail section of the aircraft separated from the rest of the fuselage, which was being attended to by rescue workers.
The private Algerian TV network Ennahar published images of body bags lined up in the field.
It is the deadliest plane crash since Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, killing all 298 people on board. The aircraft that crashed on Wednesday was a Russian- built Ilyushin Il- 76 military transport plane. The Il- 76 has been involved in a number of crashes, most recently in 2016 when one on a firefighting mission crashed near Lake Baikal in north- east Siberia, killing all 10 crew members on board.
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 Algiersbacked Polisario Front which seeks independence for the region.
Rabat considers Western Sahara an integral part of Morocco and proposes autonomy for the resource- rich territory.
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.