EgyptAir Flight Crashes in Tunisia, Killing at Least 18

Hindered by fog, rain and wind blowing from the Sahara, an EgyptAir plane with 62 people on board crashed Tuesday while trying to land at the Tunis-Carthage airport. The airline said 18 people were killed.

The plane, a Boeing 737, nearly split in two after ramming into a hill in Nahli Park about four miles from the airport. Black smoke rose from the site.

The control tower had lost contact with the plane a few seconds before the crash, just after a distress call from the pilot, according to the national news agency, TAP.

EgyptAir also said 25 people had been injured.

EgyptAir’s vice president for safety, Shaker Qilada, denied reports that the plane, which was coming from Cairo, was making an emergency landing. “It was a normal landing approach,” Qilada said.

In Cairo, Egyptian Minister of Aviation Ahmed Shafeeq held an emergency meeting with top aviation officials.

The passengers included 20 Egyptians, 17 Tunisians, five Pakistanis, three Algerians, three Jordanians, two Chinese, one Briton, one Saudi, one Palestinian and one Libyan. The crew was Egyptian.

“We felt jolts in the plane, and a member of the crew reassured us that it was only clouds. Suddenly, we saw sparks in the plane and then it hit the ground,” passenger Narjess Hadada told Associated Press. Hadada grabbed her two children and dashed out of the plane via a gaping hole created in the crash.

Other witnesses said the pilot released fuel shortly before the plane went down.

Egyptian officials were heading for Tunisia to investigate the crash. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it was dispatching a team of investigators to assist the government of Tunisia in its investigation.

On Oct. 31, 1999, an EgyptAir Boeing 767 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard.