Türkiye holds funeral for Libyan officers killed in plane crash
Türkiye on Saturday held a military funeral for five Libyan officers, including the top military chief of western Libya, who died in a plane crash in Ankara earlier this week.
Saturday's ceremony was held at 8:00 a.m. local time at the Murted Airfield base, near Ankara, and attended by the Turkish military chief and the defense minister, News.Az reports, citing Turkish media.
The five caskets, each wrapped in a Libyan national flag, were then loaded onto a plane to be returned to their home country.
The private jet with Gen. Muhammad Ali Ahmad al-Haddad, four other military officers and three crew members crashed on Tuesday after taking off from Türkiye's capital, killing everyone on board. Libyan officials said the cause of the crash was a technical malfunction on the plane.
Al-Hadad was the top military commander in western Libya and played a crucial role in the ongoing, U.N.-brokered efforts to unify Libya's military.
The high-level Libyan delegation was on its way back to Tripoli, Libya's capital, after holding defense talks in Ankara aimed at boosting military cooperation between the two countries.
The bodies recovered from the crash site were kept at the Ankara Forensic Medicine Institute for identification. Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç told reporters their DNA was compared to family members who joined a 22-person delegation that arrived from Libya after the crash.
Tunç also said Germany was asked to help examine the jet's black boxes as an impartial third party.
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