Tunisia ex-ruler’s plane sold years after ouster
TUNIS: A plane originally intended for Tunisia’s toppled president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has been sold to Turkish Airlines, Tunisair said on Sunday, six years after it was grounded following his ouster.
The Turkish firm bought the Airbus A340 for 181 million dinars ($78 million), Tunisair spokeswoman Amal Bourguiba said, without giving a date for the sale.
The A340 had arrived in the French airport of Bordeaux in the autumn of 2010 to be equipped for Ben Ali’s use, but a popular uprising in Tunisia toppled the dictator early the next year.
According to French daily SudOuest, Ben Ali — who now lives in exile in Saudi Arabia — only used the plane once to test it before it was outfitted.
Tunisair put the plane on the market in January 2012, saying it had been outfitted with a living room and bedroom “to suit the travel needs of a head of state”.
Another Airbus A340 — this one luxuriously furnished for slain Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi — has also been grounded for years in the French airport of Perpignan.
The plane, which a Kuwaiti firm was once interested in buying, still in theory belongs to Libya. ALEPPO: Suspected Russian air strikes killed at least 46 people in oppositionheld parts of Syria on Sunday, a monitor said, as government forces advanced in fierce clashes with rebels in east Aleppo.
Syria’s government is waging an offensive to recapture all of second city Aleppo, and it has so far captured more than 60 per cent of the eastern districts that fell to rebels in 2012.
In Idlib province, in northwest Syria, at least 26 civilians were killed in suspected Russian strikes on the town of Kafr Nabel, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.
An eyewitness said that warplanes hit several places in the town, including a local market.
The Observatory says it determines whose planes carries out raids according to their type, location, flight patterns and the munitions involved.
The group said 18 people were also killed in suspected Russian strikes on the town of Maaret al Numan, where an AFP photographer saw rescue workers and residents trying to pull survivors from the rubble at a vegetable market.
The monitor reported two additional deaths, one in an earlier strike on Maaret al Numan and another in Al Naqir, also in Idlib.
And it said six civilians, four of them children, had been killed in a government barrel bomb attack on the town of Al Tamanah in the south of Idlib.
Russia is a staunch ally of President Bashar al Assad’s government and began a military intervention in support of Damascus in September 2015.
Moscow says it is targeting “terrorists” and has dismissed reports of civilian casualties in its strikes.
In Aleppo, government forces advanced against rebels in east Aleppo, taking two small neighbourhoods and pushing into a third, state media said.
The army and allied forces are nearly three weeks into an operation to recapture all of Syria’s second city, divided between regime and rebel forces since 2012.
Tens of thousands of civilians have fled the offensive, which has made steady gains and threatens to deal Syria’s opposition its worst defeat of the country’s five-year civil war.
State television said on Sunday