On Monday morning, a DHL cargo plane crashed after hitting a house while landing at Vilnius Airport in Lithuania, killing one person on board and injuring three others.
The Lithuanian government’s National Crisis Management Center spokesperson confirmed that the flight was operated by Swift Air on behalf of DHL, and it crashed around 3:30 Greenwich Mean Time after taking off from Leipzig, Germany.
The spokesperson added that everyone inside the house hit by the plane survived, and there is no evidence of an explosion before the crash. “Currently, we have no data indicating there was an explosion,” the spokesperson said.
At 5:30 in the morning, about 1.3 kilometers north of the runway at Vilnius Airport, firefighters were spraying water into a smoking building. Ambulances were parked nearby, and a large number of police officers rushed to the scene. Several main roads in the vicinity were also closed off.
Flight tracking website Flightradar24 posted on social media that the flight took off from Leipzig at 2:08 GMT.
Police confirmed at a press conference that 12 people had been evacuated from the affected building.
Rescue workers stated that the aircraft had skidded at least 100 meters on the ground before crashing into the building.
A spokesperson for Vilnius Airport mentioned that the crashed cargo plane was a Boeing 737.
The head of the Lithuanian National Crisis Management Center stated that an investigation into the cause of the DHL cargo plane crash was currently underway.
Shortly after the plane crash, British counter-terrorism police mentioned they were investigating a warehouse fire in July that was caused by a package catching fire. They are in contact with other European law enforcement agencies to determine if this fire is related to similar incidents elsewhere.
In October of this year, the German Attorney General stated that Germany was investigating several fires earlier this year in Leipzig warehouses caused by incendiary devices hidden in packages.