|
Television footage showed crowds gathering around the smoking
and flaming wreckage near Boufarik airport southwest of Algiers.
A line of white body bags could be seen on the ground next to
what media said was a Russian Ilyushin transport plane.
A total of 257 people died in the crash, state TV reported.
A member of Algeria’s ruling FLN party told the private Ennahar
TV station the dead included 26 members of Polisario, an
Algerian-backed group fighting for the independence of
neighboring Western Sahara – a territory also claimed by Morocco
in a long-running dispute.
The plane was heading to Tindouf, an area on Algeria’s border
with Western Sahara, but crashed on the airport’s perimeter,
Algeria’s defense ministry said.
Tindouf is home to thousands of refugees from the Western Sahara
standoff, many of them Polisario supporters.
U.N. attempts to broker a settlement have failed for years in
the vast desert area, which has contested since 1975 when
Spanish colonial powers left. Morocco claimed the territory
while Polisario established its self-declared Sahrawi Arab
Democratic Republic there.
Algeria’s defense ministry issued a statement expressing
condolences to families of the victims.
In February 2014, an Algerian Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules
crashed in a mountainous area in eastern Algeria killing 77
passengers and leaving one survivor.
(Reporting by Lamine Chikhi, Hamid Ould Ahmed, Aidan Lewis and
Ulf Laessing; Writing by Ulf Laessing and Aidan Lewis; Editing
by John Stonestreet and Andrew Heavens)
[© 2018 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2018 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
|
|
