One crew member dead, three survive as cargo plane crashes near Vilnius airport

Helen Regan, Edward Szekeres, Sandi Sidhu, Manveena Suri and Lauren Kent, CNN

(CNN) — One crew member was killed after a cargo plane crashed early Monday on the outskirts of Vilnius Airport in Lithuania, skidded into a house and burst into flames.

Remarkably, three others on board the flight, including the pilot, survived the crash, along with 12 people in the house who were safely evacuated, according to local authorities.

The cargo plane flying from Leipzig, Germany was due to land at Vilnius Airport when it crashed a few kilometers from the runway. The plane skidded on the ground for several hundred meters before hitting a residential home, Renatas Pozela, chief of the Fire and Rescue Department, told reporters.

“One crew member was found without any signs of life,” said Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the country’s National Crisis Management Center, according to public broadcaster LRT.

The three rescued crew members – one Lithuanian national, one German and one Spanish – remain in the hospital, the Lithuanian Fire and Rescue Department told CNN. There were no reported casualties on the ground.

A spokesperson for the National Crisis Management Center later said that police and prosecutors are investigating the incident but there is nothing to suggest an explosion preceded the crash. Lithuania’s Counter-intelligence chief Darius Jauniskis told reporters at a news conference: “We cannot reject the possibility of terrorism. … But at the moment we can’t make attributions or point fingers, because we don’t have such information.”

Footage from a nearby security camera shows the plane descending, before dipping out of view behind a building. Moments later, a large fireball can be seen in the sky rising from behind the building, followed by a plume of black smoke.

The incident happened at about 5.30 a.m. local time (10 p.m. ET) near Zirniu Street, south of the capital, an airport spokesperson confirmed to CNN on Monday.

The spokesperson said due to “ongoing rescue work near Vilnius Airport,” departures for several aircraft had been delayed but that all scheduled flights were still taking off.

The fire was brought under control at 7.33 a.m. local time, according to the fire department.

The cargo plane that crashed was a Swiftair aircraft “operating under contract for DHL,” the logistics company said in a statement to CNN.

DHL said the plane “made a forced landing about one kilometer from VNO Airport.” It confirmed four people were onboard. “The cause of the accident is still unknown, and an investigation is underway,” DHL said.

The plane was a Boeing 737-400, according to a statement from Swiftair.

According to the Vilnius mayor, Valdas Benkunskas, the plane narrowly missed hitting the house directly, crashing instead into the nearby courtyard, LRT reported.

The head of the Lithuanian Police, Arūnas Paulauskas, said the incident was “most likely due to a technical fault or a human error” but that terrorism “cannot be ruled out,” according to LRT.

“This is one of the versions of the crash, which will be investigated and checked. There is a lot of work ahead. The collection of evidence can take the whole week, there will not be quick answers,” Paulauskas reportedly said.

Western security officials have said that incendiary devices that ignited in Germany and the United Kingdom in July were part of a covert Russian operation that aimed to start fires aboard cargo and passenger flights heading to the US and Canada, the Wall Street Journal reported.

A German interior ministry spokesperson said there is no indication the crash was connected to a warning by German authorities earlier this year about packages containing incendiary devices, according to Reuters. “We will have to wait for the investigations to be completed,” the interior ministry spokesperson said Monday.

US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Monday that the US Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board “are cooperating in the investigation” and providing support and expertise to Lithuania.

He declined to weigh in on the possibility of Russian involvement in the crash, saying, “we’re certainly not going to get ahead of that investigation and where the facts are going to lead them, but we are contributing some expertise on these kinds of things to help them through that.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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CNN’s Kathleen Magramo and Betsy Klein contributed reporting.