Indonesian C-130 Military Plane Crash Leaves 13 Dead
MEP: At least 13 people on board an Indonesian Hercules C-130 military aircraft were killed Sunday morning in bad weather in the easternmost province of Papua.
The US-made transport plane departed from the city of Timika at 22:35 GMT and was set to arrive at Wamena airport at 23:13 GMT. However, contact with the aircraft was lost some ten minutes before the scheduled landing, and search and rescue crews were dispatched to the area.
Air force chief of staff Agus Supriatna told MetroTV the plane was carrying food supplies from Timika to Wamena when it crashed.
The rescuers who arrived to the crash site about an hour later found no survivors. The jet reportedly hit a mountain called Lisuwa at about 23:15 GMT, Ahmad Riski Titus, operational director of Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency said, as cited by Reuters.
It was the third serious air accident in Indonesia in less than a month. On Nov. 24, a Bell 412 EP helicopter from the Indonesian army crashed in the Indonesian part of Borneo island, killing three. A week later, a police plane with 13 people aboard crashed into the sea on the way to the island of Batam, near Singapore.
