Lithuania has found no indications that the crash of a DHL cargo plane on Monday was caused by sabotage and technical problems are considered the most likely explanation, Lithuanian officials said on Wednesday, the 27th of November, according to Reuters and LRT.
The plane crashed on Monday while trying to land at Vilnius airport. One crew member was killed. Germany’s foreign minister said the incident could have been an accident or a hybrid attack in “unstable times”.
“Given everything we have and everything we know, there is nothing to suggest that it could have been sabotage,” Lithuanian Defence Minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas told reporters on Wednesday.
A visual analysis of the crash showed that there was no external damage when the plane landed, while surviving crew members said there was no chaos or disturbances inside the plane before it crashed, nor was there any smoke or smell, the minister said.
Investigators are inclined to believe that the cause of the incident was technical, said Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the country’s National Crisis Management Centre.
“If we receive additional data, we could change our position, but at the moment we don’t have any,” Vitkauskas told reporters.
The additional information is expected after the decryption of the black boxes obtained on Tuesday, which are planned to be sent to Germany for investigation. According to officials, it should not be difficult for experts to extract all the data from the black boxes, as they have not suffered major damage. The data would not be made public.
He said the systems at Vilnius airport, which are used to control arriving planes, were working as normal when they were checked on Tuesday.
The plane did not use GPS during landing, and it is unlikely that any interference could have affected such signals, officials said.