Elite Turkish soldiers killed in air crash

The Turkish military suffered a major blow when 34 officers and soldiers from the elite Special Forces were killed in a plane crash - it was the military’s worst air disaster as well as the single biggest loss for Turkey’s Special Forces.

The officers and soldiers were killed yesterday when their transport plane crashed into an apricot and beet field in the south-eastern village of Yagmurlu.

The commandos of the Special Forces are highly regarded among Turks for their successful battles behind enemy lines against Kurdish rebels, and for their capture two years ago of rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Military experts were studying data from the plane’s black box to determine the cause of the accident. One military official blamed technical malfunction.

Private CNN-Turk television said the pilot lost control of the CASA CN-235 at 17,000ft and that the aircraft fell into a steep dive.

A beet grower, who watched the plane crash into his field from a distance of 150 yards, said the plane appeared to have an engine failure and that it then crashed and exploded.

‘‘I began to look at the plane when the engine noise changed, the sound was fading then restarting,’’ Muhittin Erhan said.

Erhan said he was accustomed to hearing the noise of passing planes from his beet field, some 20 miles from a military air base in the southeastern city of Malatya.

‘‘Then it leaned over its left wing, made two circles and exploded in seconds following its crash onto its nose,’’ Erhan said in an interview early today in his village. He said several small explosions followed.

Erhan and three family members were working in their field at the time of the accident at about 1:15 p.m. (1115 GMT) Wednesday.

‘‘We feared that it would crash onto us and we ran in panic,’’ he said. ‘‘Then pieces of metal and human flesh showered us like a rain.’’

None of his family members were injured in the incident. But Erhan was treated by military nurses for shock and he was still shivering as he recalled the gruesome details of the accident.

‘‘I used my bare hands to cover the burning human remains with soil to put off the flames,’’ he said. ‘‘The biggest piece I saw was an arm with its fingers still moving.’’

Erhan said two soldiers who jumped from the plane as it was diving were killed in the explosion.

His son, Yucel, said he could not stand to see the horrifying scene and therefore was not able to help his father.

‘‘There was no one left to save, I would give anything to save at least one of them,’’ said Erhan as he fought back tears.

Military rescue workers were not immediately able to identify the remains, and collected them in plastic bags.

The bodies were flown to Ankara late Wednesday. Funeral services were scheduled in Ankara today.

The scene was sealed off by the army shortly after the crash but Erhan described the plane’s wreckage as twisted wings and pieces of burnt metal.

Debris was spread around 600 square yards. The explosion also set fire to some nearby apricot trees.

When the rain started about one hour after the crash, firefighters from the air base had already put out the flames with foam.

The cargo plane was carrying the soldiers from the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of Malatya, to Ankara.

Diyarbakir is the largest city in overwhelmingly Kurdish southeastern Turkey.

Autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels have battled Turkish soldiers in the southeast for 15 years. Some 37,000 people have died as a result of the fighting.