ADark smoke can be seen in the distance, rising like a large pillar over the Sahara. When the first pictures from Gao in the north of Mali were distributed on the X platform, formerly Twitter, on Saturday morning, there was still no sign of a plane wreck.
A little later, the suspicion was confirmed: a military plane crashed in the Sahel state in West Africa. In one picture you can see the wreckage of a white plane. Apparently it is an Ilyushin IL-76. However, as of late evening, it was unclear who chartered the plane or who owned it.
Initially there is speculation that it was a transport aircraft for the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA. A spokeswoman for the United Nations confirmed to the FAZ that the crashed aircraft was not part of the mission. It is also apparently not in the service of the Bundeswehr, which still operates a camp at Gao airport and wants to have withdrawn by the end of the year. The Bundeswehr has also rented Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft for the German MINUSMA contingent.
A FAZ query to the Bundeswehr initially remained unanswered. However, the Ilyushins, which are operated from Leipzig Airport, have a blue-painted tail. The crashed cargo plane is white on the tail.
Regarding the crash, a Bundeswehr spokesman in Gao told the AFP news agency: “According to the information we have, the plane must have overshot the runway.” Malian journalists also assume that the transport plane was unable to brake in time when landing on the runway. It caught fire and exploded a short time later. The crash site is just behind the airport. There was no official information about possible victims. However, there are said to have been dozens of soldiers and ammunition on board, says a person familiar with the case to the FAZ. The fire-fighting work was difficult.
Local journalists also reported that the aircraft belonged to the Belarusian airline Ruby Star, headquartered in Minsk, which operates four Ilyushin IL-76s. It is suspected that the aircraft was used either by the mercenary group Wagner or the Malian army. The Gao military airport is served by both the Malian army and its Russian partners and MINUSMA. A Telegram-affiliated channel of the Russian mercenary group denied at midday that the plane belonged to the militia or that there were mercenaries on board. The Malian army has not yet commented on the incident.
What is confirmed, however, is that Gao Airport was closed after the alleged accident. A transport flight from Leipzig, also carried out with an Ilyushin IL-76, which was on its way to Gao, landed in El Bayadh in Algeria on Saturday.
Bundeswehr will withdraw from Mali by the end of the year
In May of this year, the German Bundestag decided to withdraw the Bundeswehr from Mali. The upper limit was 1,400 Bundeswehr soldiers; there are currently 887 soldiers in Mali. A total of 13,000 blue helmet soldiers and 2,000 police officers were active in the UN mission, in which Germany has been involved since 2013.
The mission in the Sahel region was necessary to ensure compliance with an agreement for peace and reconciliation between former civil war parties. There is a Bundeswehr camp at Gao airport that should be completely dismantled by the end of the year.
In recent months and years, the Malian government has made it increasingly difficult for the UN mission to fulfill its mission. Bamako also relies on the mercenaries of the killed Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Mali’s military government had called for the withdrawal of international troops, whereupon the UN Security Council decided in June to end the peacekeeping mission in the country at the end of the year. Most recently, the Federal Ministry of Defense said that the withdrawal was “well on track”.
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