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Thirty-Four Killed In Turkish Army Plane Crash
ANKARA, May 16 (News Agencies) - A Turkish military plane crashed Wednesday in the country's eastern province of Malatya, killing all 34 passengers and crew in one of the country's deadliest military disasters, the general staff said.
Special commando units were aboard the CASA-type cargo plane, security officials told AFP in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, from where the aircraft took off en route to Ankara.
"The aircraft was torn to pieces," Bayram Karaaslan, the mayor of the town of Akcadag, near the scene of the crash, told the NTV news channel.
The bodies of the dead were burned beyond recognition, he added.
Witnesses said the aircraft went into a roll and then plunged to the ground in flames. The impact in a farmer's field scattered pieces of burning debris across the plain, an NTV correspondent reported.
Security forces sealed off the site and were not letting anyone, including the press, approach.
Karaaslan quoted witnesses as saying that two people managed to jump before the crash, but they also died.
Among the victims were four privates who had just completed their military service and were returning home, media reports said.
The army first reported that 37 people, all military personnel, had been aboard the plane.
Security forces managed to find the plane's black box late in the afternoon with heavy, though sporadic, rain impeding work at the disaster site, Malatya Governor Mustafa Yildirim said.
There was no immediate official word on the cause of the crash. Yildirim, however, said adverse weather conditions could have caused the crash.
"There was no explosion in mid-air, that is why experts are concentrating on the possibility of icing [in the wing mechanisms]. You know the weather was rainy," he told Anatolia news agency.
The tragedy followed three other crashes earlier this year, which claimed the lives of six military personnel, including one of the few women pilots in the Turkish armed forces.
The aircraft involved in the earlier accidents were a CASA cargo plane and two fighter jets, an F-4 and an F-5.
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