All 20 personnel on board a Turkish C-130 military cargo aircraft that crashed in Georgia close to its border with Azerbaijan have died, the Turkish Ministry of National Defence says, as investigators examine the cause of the accident at the site.
The confirmation came on Wednesday, a day after the plane crashed after taking off from the Azerbaijani city of Ganja.
“Our heroic comrades-in-arms were martyred,” Defence Minister Yasar Guler said in a social media post with photographs of the soldiers in their uniforms.
The ministry said Turkish investigators, in coordination with Georgian authorities, had begun inspecting the wreckage at the crash site in the Sighnaghi municipality of Georgia’s Kakheti district early on Wednesday.
The crash, Turkiye’s deadliest military incident since 2020, happened about 5km (3.1 miles) from the Georgian-Azerbaijani border.
Georgia’s Sakaeronavigatsia air traffic control service said the aircraft disappeared from radar soon after entering the country’s airspace, sending no distress signal before the crash.
Footage published by Azerbaijani media appeared to show the aircraft sending up a large cloud of black smoke into the sky after it crashed, leaving debris strewn across the ground.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was “deeply saddened” by the crash and expressed his condolences.
Turkiye and Azerbaijan have strong economic and cultural ties and maintain close military cooperation with Ankara training Azerbaijani officers and supplying weapons to Baku.
Erdogan and other Turkish officials attended Victory Day celebrations in Baku on November 8, marking Azerbaijan’s battlefield success over Armenia in the conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region in 2020.
Reactions have flowed in from around the world in response to the crash, with leaders and governments of countries including Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Egypt, Iran, Italy and Malta expressing condolences.
The United States ambassador to Turkiye, Tom Barrack, also expressed his country’s solidarity while NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte conveyed “deepest condolences” to Turkiye and the families of the dead.
“We honour their service and are deeply grateful for all that the Turkish Armed Forces, and indeed all our men and women in uniform across the Alliance, do to keep us safe every day,” he said in a post on X.
US firm Lockheed Martin, the maker of the C-130 Hercules, also expressed its condolences and said it was committed to assisting the investigation.
The C-130 is a four-engine, turboprop transport aircraft that is widely used by militaries around the world to carry personnel, cargo and other equipment.
