A Libyan Afriqiyah Airways plane with 104 people on board crashed yesterday on approach to Tripoli’s airport, killing at least 96 people.
A 10-year-old Dutch boy was the only known survivor, Libya’s transport minister said.
Libyan state television showed a large field scattered with small and large pieces of plane debris and dozens of police and rescue workers with surgical masks and gloves, some of them carrying at least one body away. They gathered small personal items such as wallets and cellphones from the wreckage.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Others sifted through debris — some of it still smoldering — including a flight recorder and green seats with television screens on them. A large piece of the plane’s tail was visible, bearing Afriqiyah’s brightly colored logo with the numbers “9.9.99,” a reference to the date of the founding of the African Union.
Libyan Transport Minister Mohammed Ali Zaidan said 96 bodies had been recovered from the wreckage. Libya’s official JANA news agency quoted him as saying a Dutch boy has survived the crash, but did not say anything on his condition.
Rescue workers were looking for more bodies, Zaidan said.
In Amsterdam, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said dozens of Dutch citizens were aboard the plane and confirmed a Dutch boy survived. The exact number of Dutch victims was not known, he said.
The Airbus A330-200 arriving from Johannesburg, South Africa, was approaching the airport in the Libyan capital Tripoli when it crashed at around 6am.
There was no immediate word on the cause, according to a statement by the airlines posted on its Web site.
Afriqiyah said flight 771 left Johannesburg at 1am yesterday.
“Afriqiyah Airways announces that our flight 771 had an accident during landing at Tripoli International airport,” the statement said. “At this moment, we have no information concerning possible casualties or survivors. Our information is that there were 93 passenger and 11 crew aboard. Authorities are conducting the search and rescue mission.”
The airlines later issued a second statement saying a search-and-rescue operation at the crash site “has now been completed and casualties have been moved to various hospitals.”
The flight was scheduled to continue on to London’s Gatwick airport after the stop in Tripoli.
Weather conditions over the international airport in Tripoli were good yesterday, with 4.8km visibility, scattered clouds at 3km and winds of 4.8kph.
Daniel Hoeltgen, spokesman for the European Aviation Safety Agency, said Afriqiyah had undergone 10 recent safety inspections at European airports, with no significant safety findings.
He said a team of French crash investigators was already on its way to Tripoli.
“We are currently talking to Airbus and with the French accident investigator BEA, which will be involved in the investigation,” Hoeltgen said. “We will lend our support if this is required by authorities in charge.”
Afriqiyah Airways is not on the EU list of banned airlines. The list has nearly 300 carriers deemed by the EU not to meet international safety standards.
According to initial reports, the plane crashed as it neared the threshold of Tripoli International’s main east-west runway, while preparing to touch down from the east.
The main runway at Tripoli Airport is 3.3km long.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
RSS