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| Sunday, 22 January 2006 |
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HUNGARY, Jan 21, (AFP) A military plane carrying Slovak peacekeepers ploughed into a snow-clad mountain in northeast Hungary and burst into flames, killing 42 people aboard and leaving a sole survivor, officials said Friday. The officer, who managed to call his wife by mobile telephone minutes after the crash late Thursday, escaped by a "miracle" with minimal injuries, doctors treating him said. Hungarian Defense Minister Ferenc Juhasz said the aircraft appeared to have been flying off course, and ruled out terrorism as a cause. "The plane was heading for Kosice and was three kilometres off-course after it had been handed over to Slovakian air control," he told a news conference in Budapest. "The course of the plane was through a narrow valley of the Hernad river, which is at sea level, but the two sides of the valley have mountains 700 metres high, and the plane hit one of those mountains." Smoking debris and body parts were scattered over 1,800 square metres, the interior ministry said. The dead included three women and an army chaplain. The impact snapped trees "like matchsticks," said an AFP reporter from the crash site near the village of Telkibanya. Some 600 rescue workers dug their way through the wreckage, hampered by the snow, cold and ice, and located the "black box" registering flight details. "Imagine the difficulty of our work," Hungarian interior ministry spokesman Tibor Dobson said. "We are trying to identify victims whose bodies were scattered over a very large area. And that's often from just a body part. Identifying all the victims will probably take all day." "It's minus 18 degrees Celsius (0 Fahrehneit) here. The plane's fuselage is completely burnt out. It is absolutely inconceivable that there could be other survivors," police spokesman Laszlo Garamvolgyi said. The survivor, identified by the Slovak defence ministry as First Lieutenant Martin Farkas, was rushed to hospital in Kosice, on the Slovakian side of the border. |
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