The Libyan army chief has been killed in an air crash in Turkey, Libya’s prime minister has said.<\/p>\n
Gen Mohammed Ali Ahmed al-Haddad and four others were on board a Falcon 50 aircraft flying out of the Turkish capital, Ankara, on Tuesday evening. <\/p>\n
In a post on X, Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said signal with the business jet was lost at 20:52 local time (17:52 GMT) – about 42 minutes after it took off from Ankara’s airport. <\/p>\n
The Tripoli-bound jet had issued an emergency landing request before contact was lost. The aircraft’s wreckage was later found south-west of Ankara, and an investigation is now under way into what caused the crash.<\/p>\n
In a later post on X, Yerlikaya wrote that police had spotted the debris near the village of Kesikkavak, in the Haymana district.<\/p>\n
He said the “public will be informed of further developments”.<\/p>\n
In Libya, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, the prime minister of the country’s internationally-recognised Government of National Unity (GNU), said he had received news of the deaths of Gen Haddad and other senior Libyan military officials on board the jet.<\/p>\n
The prime minister called it a “great loss” for the nation, saying Libya had “lost men who served their country with sincerity and dedication”.<\/p>\n
Gen Haddad and his team had been in Turkey for talks aimed at further strengthening military and security co-operation between the two countries.<\/p>\n
Turkey has played an increasingly dominant role in Libya after intervening in 2019 to prevent an army from the east of the country driving out the internationally-recognised government in Tripoli, and has built close political, military and economic ties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Libyan army chief has been killed in an air crash in Turkey, Libya’s prime minister has said.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":468589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-468588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115773813150253186","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}