SPAIN: Sixty-two members of the Spanish armed forces and 12 Ukrainian crew members died when their aircraft crashed in northern Turkey early yesterday morning.
A defence ministry spokesman confirmed that the Ukrainian-owned YAK-42 was en route from Afghanistan when it came down 35 km from the Black Sea town of Trabzon.
Among the dead were 40 engineers from the Brunete Mechanised Division, 33 members from the Zaragoza air force base and a Civil Guard officer. They had been deployed near Kabul with the International Security and Assistance Force for the past four months working on reconstruction and assistance programmes.
Flags at the ISAF headquarters in Kabul were lowered to half mast yesterday.
The Spanish Defence Minister, Mr Federico Trillo, flew to Turkey immediately to co-ordinate the repatriation of the bodies, although many of them are so mutilated that identification will be difficult. He was accompanied by members of a military forensic team and accident investigation experts. The black box flight recorder has been recovered.
Mr Trillo said that it was believed that thick fog and strong winds could have caused the accident, which occurred at 4.20 a.m local time. He confirmed that the pilot had made three attempts to land for refuelling at Trebzon airfield, although it is unclear why he steered towards the mountains before his aircraft disappeared from radar screens. There had been no sign of any trouble when they made an earlier refuelling stopover at the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek to take on fuel.
Rescuers who reached the crash scene within a short time found wreckage and bodies spread over a wide area but no sign of any survivors. There were reports of several explosions, although it is not clear whether they were caused by aircraft fuel or the soldiers' ammunition.
It is the worst aviation accident in the Spanish military's history. Spain has 3,000 members of its armed forces deployed on humanitarian operations, mainly in Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan, but others work in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Ukraine has a grim aviation record, attributable to a lack of safety regulations and financing and fierce competition between a multitude of companies.