VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — A DHL cargo plane crashed while approaching an airport in the capital of Lithuania and slid into a nearby house on Monday morning, leaving at least one person dead, officials said. The cause of the accident was unknown at the time.
The head of the country's fire department said the plane skidded for a few hundred meters, and photos showed smoke coming out of a damaged structure in an area with bare trees.
"The residential infrastructure around the house was on fire, and the house suffered minor damages, but we managed to evacuate the people," said Renatas Požėla, Chief of the Fire and Rescue Department.
The public broadcaster of Lithuania, LRT, citing an emergency official, said that two people had been taken to the hospital after the accident, and one of them was later declared dead.
The person who died was a member of the flight crew, but not a pilot. Firefighters freed two pilots from the cockpit, one of whom was more seriously injured than the other, according to the General Commissioner of the Lithuanian Police, Arūnas Paulauskas.
What are the possible causes of the accident?
Paulauskas said in a press conference that they still did not know the cause of the accident. Authorities were investigating, and Paulauskas said that officers had gone to the hospital to speak with the crew members who were being treated in order to gather information.
The General Commissioner also stated that investigators are considering several possible causes, such as technical failures and human errors, and have not ruled out the possibility of a terrorist act.
"This is one of the versions that must be studied and verified," said Paulauskas, according to LRT.
The airport authority of Lithuania identified the aircraft as "a DHL cargo plane flying from Leipzig, Germany, to Vilnius Airport".
Fragments of the plane in the characteristic yellow color of the company were visible in the wreckage.
Data from the FlightRadar24 flight tracking site, analyzed by The Associated Press, showed that the aircraft made a turn north of the airport, lining up for landing, before crashing just over 1.5 kilometers from the end of the runway.
Authorities did not immediately offer a cause for the accident, which occurred just before 5:30 a.m. local time. The weather at Vilnius International Airport was around freezing, with clouds before sunrise and winds around 30 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour).
DHL Group, based in Bonn, Germany, did not immediately respond to a call for comment.
The DHL plane was operated by Swiftair, a contractor based in Madrid. A company representative said they had no immediate comments.
The Boeing 737 was 31 years old, which is considered by experts as an old airframe, although that is not unusual for cargo flights.