Istanbul [Turkey], November 13: All 20 crew members on board a Turkish military aircraft were killed when it crashed in the border region between Georgia and Azerbaijan on Tuesday.
The Turkish Ministry of Defence published pictures of the 20 deceased military personnel on social media platform X on Wednesday.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the bodies of 19 people had been recovered so far. The Turkish leader gave the update on the recovery efforts on Wednesday at a meeting of provincial heads of his governing Justice and Development (AK) Party in Ankara, the Anadolu news agency reported, hours after Turkiye's Ministry of National Defence confirmed that all 20 soldiers on board the plane had died.
"Ongoing work at the crash site is being closely monitored, and all necessary investigations will be done meticulously to clarify every aspect of the incident," Erdogan said, adding that search efforts were continuing to locate the remaining victim's body.
State news agency Anadolu reported that the cause of the crash in Georgia has not yet been determined. The C-130 aircraft had departed from Azerbaijan en route to Turkiye with 20 people on board.
The crash, Turkiye's deadliest military incident since 2020, happened about five kilometres (3.1 miles) from the Georgia-Azerbaijan border on Tuesday after the aircraft took off from the Azerbaijani city of Ganja.
"Our heroic comrades-in-arms were martyred," Defence Minister Yasar Guler said in a social media post with photographs of the soldiers in their uniforms. Images purportedly showing the incident circulating on social media show an aircraft crashing vertically to the ground at high speed.
The wreckage was spread across a plain that includes farmland and is surrounded by hills, Turkish private broadcaster NTV reporteds.
Georgian and Turkish search and rescue teams were dispatched to the region, according to Anadolu.
The Georgian Interior Ministry told Russian news agency TASS that the plane went down about 5 kilometres from the border with Azerbaijan.
Authorities are investigating whether violations of aviation safety or operational rules contributed to the crash.
Source: Qatar Tribune
