Ukrainian cargo plane with ammunition from Serbia until Bangladesh crashed in the north Greece late Saturday, killing all eight crew members on board, Greek and Serbian authorities said on Sunday.
Witnesses said the plane crashed into a fireball near the town of Kavala before exploding in a crash in cornfields around midnight local time.
The pilot had previously reported engine trouble and requested an emergency landing.
Drone footage of the scene showed smoldering debris from the Antonov An-12 plane scattered across fields.
Ukraine-based airline Meridian, which operated the plane, confirmed that all eight crew members had died in the crash.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said they were all Ukrainian citizens.
Greek authorities have so far recovered the body of a crew member, a civil defense service spokesman said. Six bodies have been found during an initial drone survey of the area, a local mayor said.
Serbian Defense Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said the plane had carried 11.5 tons of products, including mortar shells and practice grenades, made by the defense industry. The buyer of the cargo was the Ministry of Defense of Bangladesh, he added.
Meridian general manager Denys Bogdanovych confirmed that story and said the crash had nothing to do with the war currently raging in Ukraine.
Greek state television ERT said the plane’s signal was lost shortly after the pilot requested an emergency landing. Amateur video footage uploaded to ertnews.gr showed the plane quickly descending in flames before hitting the ground in what appeared to be an explosion.
“I wonder how it didn’t fall on our homes,” a witness, Aimilia Tsaptanova, told reporters. “It was full of smoke, it made a sound I can’t describe and went over the mountain. It passed the mountain and turned and crashed into the fields.”
The Greek authorities said the special emergency response unit and military personnel, including mine clearance units, had been sent to the site. They banned people from moving in the area and advised residents to keep doors and windows closed.
A fire department official said on Sunday that firefighters “felt their lips burning” and white dust was floating in the air. The substance has been investigated and not found as a radioactive or biological material that poses a public health hazard, the mayor of the wider region, Philippos Anastasiades, told reporters.
Some businesses and households in the area experienced power outages after the crash, possibly because the plane cut cables or was burned by the explosion, local media said. More explosions took place the night after the crash.