A DHL cargo plane crashed into a house on Monday morning near Lithuania’s capital, killing at least one person.
The head of the country’s police said plane crashed shortly before landing at Vilnius airport.
“It fell a few kilometers before the airport, it just skidded for a few hundred meters, its debris somewhat caught a residential house,” said police commissioner-general, Renatas Požėla. “Residential infrastructure around the house was on fire, and the house was slightly damaged, but we managed to evacuate people.”
Lithuanian’s public broadcaster LRT, quoting an emergency official, said two people had been taken to the hospital after the crash, and one was later pronounced dead.
The Lithuanian airport authority identified the aircraft as a DHL cargo plane arriving from Leipzig, Germany. It posted on the social platform X that city services including a fire truck were on site.
Flight-tracking data from FlightRadar24, analyzed by The Associated Press, showed the aircraft made a turn to the north of the airport, lining up for landing, before crashing a little more than 1.5 kilometres (1 mile) short of the runway.
Authorities did not immediately offer a cause for the crash, which happened just before 5.30am local time. Weather at the airport was around freezing temperature, with clouds before sunrise and winds around 30kmph (18mph).
DHL Group, headquartered in Bonn, Germany, did not immediately return a call for comment.
The DHL aircraft was operated by Swiftair, a Madrid-based contractor. The carrier could not be immediately reached.
The Boeing 737 was 31 years old, which is considered by experts to be an older airframe, though that’s not unusual for cargo flights.
All of the people in the house survived, a spokesperson for the governmental National Crisis Management Center said. The spokesperson said there was nothing to suggest an explosion preceded the crash.
“At the moment we don’t have any data that there was an explosion”, he said.
Police told a press conference 12 people had been evacuated from the house hit by the plane.