Crash plunges nation into mourning
ALGERIA: Algeria has been plunged into mourning after a military transport plane crashed just after takeoff, killing 257 people in the worst aviation disaster in the nation’s history.
Soldiers, their family members and a group of 30 people returning to refugee camps from hospital stays in the capital, Algiers, died in the crash of the Russian-made II-76 aircraft on Wednesday. The plane went down in a field just outside a military base in Boufarik, 30km south of Algiers, and was devoured by flames, killing 247 passengers and 10 crew, the Defence Ministry said.
There was no official mention of survivors, but one witness reported seeing people jumping out of the aircraft before it crashed. Arabic-language channel Dzair TV reported that five people were in a critical condition in hospital, but it was unclear if they had been on the plane or were injured on the ground.
Several witnesses told Algerian TV network Ennahar that they saw flames coming out of one of the plane’s four engines just before it took off.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has ordered three days of mourning and Friday prayers for the dead at mosques across the country.
In the south, the Algerianbacked Polisario Front, which is seeking independence for neighbouring Western Sahara, a disputed territory annexed by Morocco, has ordered a week of mourning for the 30 dead Sahrawi people, who were returning to its refugee camps in Tindouf.
It was the first crash of an Algerian military plane since February 2014, when an Americanbuilt C-130 Hercules turboprop slammed into a mountain in Algeria, killing at least 76 people and leaving just one survivor.
The heavy loss of life of soldiers is certain to deeply shake Algeria. The National Liberation Army – which grew out of the fighting force that freed Algeria from French colonial rule in the 1960s – is revered by Algerians and credited with saving the nation from an insurgency by Islamist extremists in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The previous deadliest crash on Algerian soil occurred in 2003, when 102 people were killed when a civilian airliner crashed at an airport in Tamanrasset, in the south. Only one person survived. Also in 2003, 10 people died when an air force C-130 crashed after an engine caught fire shortly after it took off from the air base near Boufarik.