Military plane crash kills three in Turkey

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – A Turkish army-owned CASA transport plane crashed on Wednesday killing two pilots and a technician who were on a training flight, the military said in a statement.

The Spanish-Indonesian made CASA CN 235 took off before noon local time from a main airbase in Eskisehir Province,  230 kilometers (142 miles) west of the capital Ankara, and was lost at about 1:00 p.m.

In the online statement, general staff said search and rescue teams found the plane’s debris and bodies of the three military personnel an hour and a half later in a mountainous, snow-clad region north of the Lake Egirdi in the Isparta Province, some 220 kilometers further south.

It was not immediately clear what led to the crash. However, the army said an investigation was underway.

First-responder civilians from nearby villages talking to the state media said the weather in the region was “extremely foggy” at the time of the crash.

In December 2016, shortly after taking off, an F16 warplane crashed in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, while its pilot survived.

The Ankara government is locked in a decades-long conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), waging an intensified aerial campaign against the group demanding Kurdish self-rule.

Fatal aerial incidents involving the CASA type planes have killed 41 Turkish soldiers since 2001.

That year, according to archives, three crashes took place, including one that killed 37 soldiers in the Kurdish province of Malatya.

In another crash in May the same year, three Spanish personnel and one Turkish soldier were killed.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany