A Turkish Airlines flight crashed tonight as it tried to land at an airport in south-eastern Turkey, killing 72 people, Interior Minister Mr Abdulkadir Aksu said.
The plane, which was on its way from Istanbul, crashed in heavy fog as it landed at Diyarbakir airport. Mr Aksu said the plane carried 77 people and that there were only five survivors.
The RJ-100 passenger aircraft plane crashed in a military area near the airport and soldiers helped to evacuate the injured.
Five of the injured were taken to nearby Diyarbakir hospital, suffering from shock but no life-threatening injuries.
Last week, several flights to Diyarbakir were cancelled due to poor conditions on the runway.
Diyarbakir is a largely Kurdish city, some 850 miles south-east of Istanbul and 75 miles north of the Syrian border. In November, a Russian small plane carrying 28 people crashed near an airport in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya after it clipped a power line. No one was killed.
In May 2001, a military transport plane crashed in south-eastern Turkey, killing 34 officers and soldiers from Turkey's elite special forces.
A civilian jetliner crashed in eastern Turkey in 1991, killing 55 people after the pilot insisted on landing despite a snowstorm that drastically cut visibility.
PA