A cargo plane crashed on its approach to an airport in Vilnius and slid into a nearby house, killing at least one person who was aboard the aircraft, Lithuanian officials said on Monday.
Three other people on the plane were hurt and no one on the ground suffered any injury, they added.
A Lithuanian police spokesperson gave the nationality of the deceased as Spanish, and said the remaining members of the crew were one fellow Spaniard, a German, and a Lithuanian.
The cause of the accident is not yet known, but Renatas Požėla, chief of Lithuania’s Fire and Rescue Department, said that the plane skidded for a few hundred meters after hitting the ground, and photos showed smoke billowing into the sky from a damaged dwelling in a wooded area.
“Residential infrastructure around the house was on fire, and the house was slightly damaged, but we managed to evacuate people,” he said.
The flight was operated by airline Swiftair on behalf of DHL out of Leipzig, Germany, and the crash occurred around 5:30 a.m. local time.
An airport spokesperson confirmed the plane was a Boeing 737-400.
The plane was 31 years old, which is considered to be an older aircraft by aviation experts, but age is not unusual for cargo flights.
“In the recording of the conversation between the pilots and the tower, the pilots, until the very last second, did not tell the tower of any extraordinary event,” said Marius Baranauskas, head of the Lithuanian National Aviation Authority.
“We need to examine the black boxes to know what was happening in the aircraft.”
The two pilots were freed from the cockpit by firefighters after the incident, with one reportedly being more seriously injured than the other, according to the general commissioner of the Lithuanian Police, Arūnas Paulauskas.
Paulauskas told a news conference that investigations were underway.
He said officers had gone to the hospital to speak with the crew members being treated to try to gather information on what had happened.
Paulauskas said investigators are considering several possible causes, including technical failure and human error, but had not yet ruled out the possibility of foul play or terrorism.
“This is one of the versions that must be studied and checked,” Paulauskas said, according to state broadcaster LRT.
Vilnius’s counterintelligence chief Darius Jauniškis also told reporters: “We cannot reject the possibility of terrorism. ... But at the moment, we can’t make attributions or point fingers, because we don’t have such information.”
Lithuanian police and prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation, and a unit within the Justice Ministry will carry out a civil aviation incident probe.
“Only these investigations will answer questions on the real reasons of the incident, speculations and guesses will really not help to determine the truth”, Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said in a statement.
A spokesperson for DHL Lithuania said, “We do not have any information that any of the parcels onboard the crashed cargo plane were suspicious.”
Boeing said it is working to gather more information and stood ready to provide further support.
Swiftair is yet to comment on the incident.
The incident comes at a time of increased concern around freight transportation in Europe, with Germany already investigating several fires caused by incendiary devices hidden inside parcels at a warehouse in Leipzig earlier this year.
Police in the UK are also investigating a warehouse fire in Birmingham in July, caused by a package catching fire, and liaising with law enforcement agencies across the continent to see if there is a connection with similar incidents elsewhere.
