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Libya’s military chief and other senior officials were killed when their plane crashed near Ankara after a reported technical fault.
Mohammed Ali Ahmed al-Haddad, chief of the general staff of the internationally recognized Tripoli-based government, left Ankara in a private jet late Tuesday after talks with his Turkish counterpart and the country’s defense minister, Yasser Guler.
Four other people from Ahmed’s delegation – including the head of Libyan ground forces, al-Fitouri Gharibil – and three crew members were also on the plane, whose crew said they would attempt an emergency landing. Turkish officials said everyone on board the plane was killed.
The visit came a day after the Turkish parliament extended the mandate for Turkish troops to serve in Libya, part of a 2019 security agreement between Turkey and the Tripoli-based government.
Turkey has supported the UN-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, providing training and equipment to Libyan forces in the fight against the eastern-based Libyan National Army, which is led by rebel commander Khalifa Haftar and backed by Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and others.
Turkey’s assistance was seen as decisive in the GNU repelling Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli in 2019 and 2020, one of the deadliest in the civil war that began in Libya in 2014.
Libyan Prime Minister Abdul-Hamid Dbeibah called the crash “a tragic accident” in a post on Facebook. Türkiye’s state-run Anadolu news agency said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke to Dbeibah on Wednesday to offer condolences.
Al-Haddad, who became a top Western general in 2020, had worked to expand military ties with Türkiye and other countries. He was also part of UN-backed efforts to unify Libya’s military factions while negotiating with its eastern counterpart in recent years.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya told reporters that the Dassault Falcon 50 jet carrying the delegation had informed aviation authorities about an electrical fault and requested to return to Ankara’s Esenboga Airport for an emergency landing immediately after takeoff.
Contact with the aircraft was lost 20 minutes later at 8.52 pm local time when the jet was about 85 km south-west of the airport.
A witness outside Hemana told the CNNTurk news channel that around 8.50pm there was a “very violent explosion” that shook the ground, followed by a flash of light in the sky.
Yerlikaya said search teams recovered cockpit voice and flight-data recorders early Wednesday and continued to search the 3 square kilometer crash site near the town of Hemana.
A delegation of 22 people from Libya, including family members and defense officials, has gone to Türkiye and a criminal investigation is underway, he said.
