This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the deadly crash of a cargo plane in Lithuania on November 25 could have been a “hybrid incident” with outside involvement.
“We must now seriously ask ourselves whether this was an accident or whether it was another hybrid incident,” Baerbock told reporters at a G7 foreign ministers meeting in Italy.
“We have recently seen multiple hybrid attacks in Europe, often targeting individuals and infrastructure, whether underwater or hard infrastructure,” she said, alluding to the recent severing of telecom cables in the Baltic Sea that officials have said could have been sabotage.
German authorities are working very closely with the Lithuanian authorities to get to the bottom of the crash, she added.
Lithuanian authorities have so far stopped short of making the same link.
“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,” Lithuanian counterintelligence chief Darius Jauniskis told reporters.
Marius Baranauskas, head of the Lithuanian National Aviation Authority, said the communications between the pilots and the control tower indicated nothing extraordinary, adding that investigators need to examine the black-box recordings to know what was happening in the aircraft.
Many Western intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of involvement in sabotage acts in Europe, which they have said are aimed at destabilizing allies of Ukraine as it relies on Western governments in its war against Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The cargo plane, which belonged to global courier DHL, crashed as it attempted to land at Vilnius airport, killing the jet’s Spanish pilot and injuring another Spanish crew member, a German, and a Lithuanian, according to airport and police officials cited by Reuters. At least one of the injured was in critical condition.
The plane, a Boeing 737-400 jet that had departed Leipzig, Germany, about 90 minutes before the crash, hit several buildings as it skidded hundreds meters, according to the police and DHL. A spokesperson for the governmental National Crisis Management Center said one of the buildings hit was a house whose occupants survived.
Firefighters were not able to determine whether the plane began burning or breaking up while still in the air, and authorities were still looking for the black boxes that record flight data.
A DHL statement said the plane “made a forced landing” about 1 kilometer from the Vilnius airport and the cause of the crash was still unknown.
Lithuanian Commissioner-General of Police Arunas Paulauskas said surviving crew members told investigators there was no smoke, fire, or other emergency situation in the cabin prior to the crash. He also said the probability of an external force impact was very low.
The crash came after a series of fires at DHL depots in Britain and Germany during the summer. Western security officials were quoted in a news report earlier this month linking the fires to a test run of an alleged Russian operation aimed at igniting fires on cargo or passenger aircraft bound for North America.
The Wall Street Journal quoted security officials as saying that devices that ignited in July in DHL depots in Leipzig and the British city of Birmingham were part of the test run.
Last month, Polish officials said four people had been detained as a result of the investigation into parcels that caught fire while en route to United States and Canada.
The activities of the four people “consisted of sabotage and diversion related to sending parcels containing camouflaged explosives and dangerous materials via courier companies to European Union countries and Great Britain, which spontaneously ignited or detonated during land and air transport,” Polish prosecutors said in a statement on October 25.
“The group’s goal was also to test the transfer channel for such parcels, which were ultimately to be sent to the United States of America and Canada,” the statement said, adding that foreign intelligence services were to blame. The statement did not directly accuse Russia of involvement.
Canada in early November expressed concern to Russian officials after he arrests were announced. Russia responded by summoning a Canadian diplomat on November 8 to rebut allegations that Russia’s secret services had orchestrated the campaign to mail explosive packages.
