Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that 19 bodies of the 20 soldiers on board a Turkish C-130 military cargo plane that crashed in Georgia had been recovered, along with the aircraft’s flight recorder.
The Turkish leader gave the update on the recovery efforts on Wednesday at a meeting of provincial heads of his governing Justice and Development (AK) Party in Ankara, the Anadolu news agency reported, hours after Turkiye’s Ministry of National Defence confirmed that all 20 soldiers on board the plane had died.
“Ongoing work at the crash site is being closely monitored, and all necessary investigations will be done meticulously to clarify every aspect of the incident,” Erdogan said, adding that search efforts were continuing to locate the remaining victim’s body.
The ministry said a Turkish accident investigation team, 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 five kilometres (3.1 miles) from the Georgia-Azerbaijan border on Tuesday after the aircraft took 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.
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.
The wreckage was spread across a plain that includes farmland and is surrounded by hills, Turkish private broadcaster NTV reported from the crash site, with debris scattered across multiple locations.