737 crash could be ‘hybrid incident’, says German foreign minister
A 737-400 operated by Swiftair on behalf of DHL which crashed near Lithuania’s Vilnius airport on Monday, killing one person, may have been a “hybrid incident”, the German foreign minister has said.
Without spelling out who may have been involved in the incident, Annalena Baerbock said it was proof of the “volatile times” that Europe was facing.
Russia has been blamed for sabotaging undersea cables and for sending two incendiary devices to DHL logistics hubs in Germany and the UK in July.
“The fact that we, together with our Lithuanian and Spanish partners, must now seriously ask ourselves whether this was an accident or, after last week, another hybrid incident shows what volatile times we are currently living in, even in the centre of Europe,” she said.
Flight BCS18D left Leipzig at around 3am before crashing in a residential area just short of the runway at Vilnius approximately an hour and a half later.
CCTV footage showed the 737-400 disappearing from sight beyond the treeline before a fireball erupts.
Baerbock is not the only official to raise the prospect of a deliberate plot to down the aircraft. Lithuania’s counter-intelligence chief Darius Jauniskis reportedly told a press conference on Monday: “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”.
