A Russian An-26 military transport plane crashed into a cliff in Crimea, killing 29 people on board.
Tass news agency, quoting the country’s defence ministry, said the crash site lay in Crimea – a peninsula jutting into the Black Sea that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The ministry confirmed 23 passengers and six crew members died in the incident.
“On 31 March at around 18:00 Moscow time, contact was lost with the An-26 military transport aircraft whilst it was on a scheduled flight over the Crimean Peninsula,” the ministry said.
The media reports did not specify how many people were aboard, nor did they mention any survivors.
“The An-26 aircraft, with which communication was lost earlier, crashed into a cliff, it was reported to TASS from the site of the crash,” reports Tass.
RIA news agency stated that initial assessments pointed to technical problems as the likely cause of the crash.
Russia’s defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An-26 served since the late 1960s and airlines have also used the model for freight operations, but the aircraft has figured in several deadly crashes over the past decade.
A Ukrainian An-26 crashed during a technical flight in Ukraine’s south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region in 2022, killing one person. Another aircraft went down on a training flight in north-eastern Ukraine in 2020, leaving all but one of 27 on board dead.
Eight people, including five Russians, died when an An-26 crashed in South Sudan in 2020. Four of ten people on board perished when an An-26 crashed on landing in Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa in 2017.
