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A military transport plane has crashed in eastern Algeria, killing 103 people, an Algerian security source has said. The plane, a C-130 Hercules aircraft, was reportedly flying “in poor weather conditions” and crashed into Djebel Fertas mountain shortly before it was to land in Constantine, the report said.
A senior military official told the official APS news agency that 99 passengers and four crew members had been on board the plane, but that the death toll was “yet to be determined”.
Colonel Lahmadi Bouguern also said that bad weather and gusty winds were probably the cause of the crash. The transport plane took off from Algeria’s southern Tamanrasset province and was bound for the eastern city of Constantine, 350km east of Algiers, Reuters said.
Witnesses in the area said that the plane clipped a mountain and then crashed. Military and civilian personnel were deployed for a search and rescue operation, with hospitals in Constantine and nearby Ain M’Lila placed on alert in case there were any survivors, the independent El Watan newspaper reported.
Tamanrasset, in the far south of Algeria, near the border with Mali, is the main base for the country’s southern military operations.
Extra troops and equipment have been stationed there in recent months as part of efforts to beef up surveillance of Algeria’s frontiers with Mali and Libya, following a deadly hostage-taking by Islamist militants at a desert gas plant in January last year.
Yesterday’s plane crash would be the worst in Algeria since 2003 when an Air Algerie jet crashed shortly after takeoff from Tamanrasset, killing 102 people.
In December 2012, two military jets conducting routine training operations collided in mid air near Tlemcen, in Algeria’s northwest, killing the pilots of both planes.
A month earlier, a twin-turboprop Casa C-295 military transport aircraft, which was carrying a cargo of paper for the printing of banknotes in Algeria, crashed in southern France.
That plane was carrying five soldiers and a representative of the Algerian central bank, none of whom survived. — Al Jazeera
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