Morocco plane crash kills 78
A Moroccan military plane crash in a remote mountainous region of the North African nation on Tuesday killed at least 78 people and seriously injured three, according to Morocco’s official news agency.
The C-130 transport plane carried 60 soldiers, nine crew members and a dozen civilians and was preparing to land at an airport near the border with the disputed region of Western Sahara, according to local media reports. The wounded were taken to a military hospital in the nearby town of Guelmim while a search of the site continued, the Maghreb Arabe Presse Agency reported.
Amateur video footage broadcast on Arab television appeared to show the blackened remains of the plane across the side of a mountain.
According to a statement by Morocco’s Royal Armed Forces, bad weather caused the crash, described as one of the deadliest aviation accidents in recent Moroccan history.
The news agency said the plane was transporting troops either to or from Laayoune and Dakhla, both cities in Western Sahara, a sparsely populated desert coastal territory south of the crash site.
The vast coastal region has been the site of an insurgency waged since the 1970s by Polisario separatists seeking autonomy from Morocco, which claims the territory as its own.
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