DHL cargo plane crashes and skids into a house in Lithuania, killing at least one

A DHL cargo plane crashed on approach to an airport in Lithuania’s capital and skidded into a nearby house yesterday, leaving at least one person dead, officials said. The cause of the accident was not immediately known.

The head of the country’s firefighting service said that the plane skidded for a few hundred meters, and photos showed smoke rising from a damaged structure in an area of barren trees.

“Residential infrastructure around the house was on fire, and the house was slightly damaged, but we managed to evacuate people,” said Renatas Požėla, chief of the Fire and Rescue Department.

Lithuanian’s public broadcaster LRT, quoting an emergency official, said two people had been taken to the hospital after the crash, and one was later pronounced dead.

The person who was killed was a member of the flight crew but not a pilot. Firefighters freed two pilots from the cockpit, one of whom was more seriously injured than the other, according to the General Commissioner of the Lithuanian Police, Arūnas Paulauskas.

Paulauskas told a news conference that the causes of the accident were not yet known.