Airliner Carrying 77 Crashes in Turkey

January 8, 2003

ISTANBUL, Turkey  — A Turkish Airlines flight crashed Wednesday as it tried to land at an airport in southeastern Turkey, killing 72 people, Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu said.

The plane, which was on its way from Istanbul, crashed in the largely Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, the semiofficial Anatolia news agency reported. Private NTV television said the plane crashed in heavy fog.

NTV television quoted Aksu as saying that the plane carried 77 people and that there were only five survivors.

The RJ-100 passenger aircraft crashed in a military area near the airport, and soldiers were helping to evacuate the injured, one Turkish television network reported. The RJ-100 is a four-engine plane built by British Aerospace.

The five injured were evacuated to the main hospital in Diyarbakir, about 635 miles southeast of Istanbul and 75 miles north of the Syrian border.

Last week, several flights to Diyarbakir were canceled because of poor conditions on the runway.

In May 2001, a military transport plane crashed in southeastern Turkey, killing 34 officers and soldiers from Turkey's elite special forces.

A civilian jetliner crashed in eastern Turkey in 1991, killing 55 people after the pilot insisted on landing despite a snowstorm that drastically cut visibility.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,74986,00.html