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The bodies of the Turkish soldiers from Tuesday’s cargo plane crash along the Georgia-Azerbaijan border have all been recovered and are set to be repatriated to Türkiye on Thursday, the Defense Ministry said on the same day.
At a weekly press briefing, the ministry gave an update on the crash investigation. The flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice data recorder (CVDR) from the aircraft have both been brought to Türkiye for analysis and are currently being examined in the capital Ankara.
The ministry said the expected official crash report would uncover the cause and added that the aircraft was not carrying ammunitions on its last flight.
It was carrying a 10-person maintenance team for Turkish F-16s that had earlier taken part in Victory Day celebrations in Azerbaijan, as well as the flight crew and maintenance equipment, the ministry said.
All planned flights by Türkiye‘s 18 C-130 planes had been suspended pending inspections after the incident, the ministry added.
Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Kavelashvili on Wednesday discussed the investigation into the crash of a Turkish military cargo plane and the recent developments.
During a phone call, Erdoğan expressed Ankara’s gratitude to Tbilisi for its cooperation, Türkiye’s Directorate of Communications said on social media.
For his part, Kavelashvili offered his condolences to Ankara over the loss of Turkish soldiers’ lives in the accident.
On Tuesday, a Turkish C-130 military cargo aircraft en route from Azerbaijan crashed in Georgia.
Erdoğan said in a speech to his party in Ankara that the cause of the crash in Georgia has not yet been determined. Authorities are investigating whether violations of aviation safety or operational rules contributed to the crash. Erdoğan said investigators had found the aircraft’s black box and were looking into what caused the crash.
Georgian air traffic control said the plane had disappeared from its radar shortly after entering its airspace “without transmitting a distress signal” and that it had been alerted to the crash by the emergency services.
The C-130 Hercules military cargo plane is made by U.S. manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
Condolences from around the world poured in after the crash.
