Plane Crash Kills Peacekeepers

A Ukrainian airplane crashed and exploded into flames Monday while trying to refuel in Turkey, killing all 75 people aboard, mostly Spanish peacekeepers returning home after serving in Afghanistan.

The plane was flying from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Zaragoza, Spain, with a refueling stop in the Black Sea port of Trabzon.

The Russian made YAK-42, which belonged to the Ukrainian company of Sredizemnomorske, hit a mountain slope near the town of Macka, 30 miles south of Trabzon, according to Turkish officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The plane, which apparently carried ammunition belonging to the Spanish soldiers, burst into flames and exploded into pieces upon impact. Turkish soldiers reportedly saw unexploded hand grenades among the wreckage and evacuated the rescue site, fearing further explosions.

The airplane carried 62 passengers - all Spanish peacekeeping forces - 12 crew members, and a Belarusian flight manager, the Turkish officials said. The dead on the plane included 41 army soldiers and 21 air force personnel, the Spanish Defense Ministry said.

The plane apparently went down on its third attempt to land in thick fog at Trabzon airport, Gov. Aslan Yildirim of Trabzon told CNN-Turk. He said the pilot reported not being able to see the runway in the first two attempts, and the plane disappeared from radar screens at 4:45 a.m.

Turkish military officials at the scene retrieved more than 25 charred bodies from the wreckage and said there were no survivors.

"It will be very difficult to identify them," Yildirim said. "Most bodies are in pieces or dismembered."

The soldiers also found the plane's black box, which could indicate whether there were any failures in the aircraft's operations or its systems.

Television footage showed a huge pile of twisted and burned metal covering a wide area. Reporters at the scene said diaries of soldiers, family pictures, music CDs and a half-burned camera were scattered among the debris.

The army troops were from an engineering regiment and had just finished a 4-month tour of duty, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported. It said until now, there had been no deaths among Spanish troops in the 17 months they had been involved in the Afghan peacekeeping mission.

In the Afghan capital of Kabul, Dutch Lt. Col. Paul Kolken, a spokesman for the peacekeepers, expressed condolences.

"Our sympathies are with the families of the persons involved in this plane crash," Kolken said.

The engineers had recently been working on a road to Kabul's airport that would allow heavy fuel trucks easier access to the terminals, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Madrid said. The Spanish air force had also been working at Kabul's airport.

Spain's King Juan Carlos was being briefed by top military officials on the accident.

U.S.-led coalition forces stormed into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks, ousting Afghanistan's ruling Taliban military government and the terrorists it harbored, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

The United States remains the largest coalition force in Afghanistan, with about 8,500 soldiers stationed there hunting down Taliban and al-Qaida remnants.

Separately, about 5,000 peacekeepers have been in Kabul since December 2001 to help control the war-shattered capital. Germany and the Netherlands took command of the international contingent, called the International Security Assistance Force, in February, taking over from Turkey.

By Selcan Hacaoglu