BREAKING NEWS Military jet crashes into a school campus in fireball explosion leaving at least one dead in Bangladesh
The aircraft crashed on a campus of the Milestone School and College in the city's Uttara area in the afternoon, where children were present.
Television footage showed fire and smoke billowing from the site of the crash.
The Bangladesh Army's public relations office confirmed in a brief statement that the downed F-7 BGI aircraft belonged to the Air Force.
Fire official Lima Khan stated by phone that at least one person died and four others were injured, though she did not provide further details.
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Three dead in California after small plane crash near Monterey Bay, Coast Guard says
Three people are dead after a small private aircraft crashed on California's Central Coast, according to officials. The U.S. Coast Guard station in Monterey received a relay at 10:55 p.m. Saturday that a twin-engine Beechcraft plane that took off from San Carlos with three people onboard had crashed 200 to 300 yards off Point Pinos, an outcropping at the southern end of Monterey Bay roughly 125 miles south of San Francisco. The Coast Guard launched a rescue helicopter from San Francisco and a search boat from Monterey to hunt for survivors of the crashed plane, which had a tail number of N8796R. A boat crew and drones from CAL Fire, as well as local police departments, joined the search. The wreck was eventually located and its three passengers were found dead, the Coast Guard told The New York Times. The names of the passengers were not immediately made public. The Independent has requested comment from the Coast Guard. The crash occurred roughly 30 minutes after takeoff near the Monterey Regional Airport, the flight's intended destination, according to flight tracking site Flightradar 24. Bodies were recovered off the coast of Pacific Grove, KSBW reports, and aircraft debris has washed up onshore. "I was going to sleep and heard this loud engine grumbling. Sounded like a Cessna, but it was really low and loud. It kind of felt like it was over the house, and there was a pop," Brian Mitchell, who was in the area from Sacramento visiting a relative, told the outlet.
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Dhaka crash: 'A sound I've never heard - then the jet flew over my head'
"It was like 30 or 40 thunderbolts falling from the sky," said Ahnaf Bin Hasan, an 18-year-old student whose voice still trembled two days after the crash. "I've never heard a sound like that in my life - it came from the sky. In a split second, the fighter jet flew over my head and crashed into the school building."The Bangladesh Air Force F-7 plane had plummeted from the sky and slammed into the primary school building of the Milestone School and College in Dhaka on Monday, marking Bangladesh's deadliest aviation disaster in decades. At least 31 people were killed - many of them schoolchildren under 12 - while waiting to be picked up, heading to coaching classes, or grabbing a quick in his chocolate brown shirt and black trousers, school badge pinned neatly, Ahnaf was chatting with a friend under a canopy on the playground of the sprawling 12-acre campus of Milestone School and College, in the busy Uttara neighbourhood. He says he was barely 30 feet away when the jet nosedived into the building. Ahnaf instinctively dropped to the ground, bracing his head with his hands. When he opened his eyes, the world around him had changed."All I could see was smoke, fire, and darkness. Children were screaming. Everything was chaos," he told the BBC on the phone. The air force said the jet, on a training flight, experienced a mechanical fault shortly after takeoff. The pilot, who ejected just before the crash, later died in hospital."I saw the pilot eject," Ahnaf said. "After the crash, I looked up and saw his white parachute descending. He broke through the tin roof of another building. I heard he was alive after landing, even asked for water. A helicopter came and took him away."As smoke and flames spread through the school, Ahnaf's instincts kicked in. A flaming splinter from the burning plane had struck his backpack, singed his trousers and scorched his hand. "It was so hot, but I threw the bag aside and ran to help."He ran toward the concrete walkway separating the playground from the two-storey primary school building. The plane had slammed into the gate, burrowed six to seven feet into the ground, then tilted upward, crashed into the first floor, and exploded. Two classrooms named Cloud and Sky had become the ground zero of the crash. Near the entrance, Ahnaf saw a student's body, torn apart."It looked like the plane had hit him before slamming into the building," he said. "He was younger than us."The five-building campus, usually buzzing with student chatter, had turned into a scene of fire, splintered metal, and the smoke, Ahnaf spotted a junior student whose skin was scorched and whose body had been pulled out of the blaze by a friend."His friend told me, 'I can't do this alone. Can you help me?' So I picked the boy up, put him on my shoulder, and carried him to the medical room."Another woman was on fire. Children ran from the building stripped to their underclothes, their garments burned off, their skin blistering in the intense heat."On the second floor, students were stranded and screaming," Ahnaf said. "We broke open a grille to reach one of the gates, which was on fire. The army and fire service came in and rescued some of them."Ahnaf, like many others, quickly took on roles far beyond his age."We helped control the crowds, kept people away from the fire. We cleared the roads for ambulances and helped fire service crews pull their pipes through the campus."At one point, he gave the shirt off his back - literally."One student had nothing on him. I took off my uniform and gave it to him. I continued bare-bodied with the rescue."But the weight of so many young lives lost at the school is something he says will be hard to overcome. One of them was 11-year-old Wakia Firdous had walked to school that morning like any other day. When the plane hit, her father was at prayer - he ran barefoot from the mosque as soon as he uncle, Syed Billal Hossain, told me that the family spent the entire night searching more than half a dozen hospitals. "We walked across Uttara, helpless. Someone said six bodies were at one hospital. At one in the morning on Tuesday, her father identified her - by her teeth and a problem in her eye. But we still haven't been given the body."The pain of losing a child was only compounded by the bureaucratic maze. Despite identifying their daughter by a dental feature and a lens in her eye, the family was told the body wouldn't be released without DNA tests - because there were multiple claimants. First, a police report had to be filed. Then the father gave blood at the military hospital. Now they were waiting for the mother's sample to be drawn. "We know it's her," said Mr Hossain. "But they still won't hand over the body."Wakia, the youngest of three siblings, lived next door to her uncle in an old ancestral home in Diabari. "She grew up in front of our eyes - playing on rooftops, sitting under the coconut tree next to our house, always cradling her baby niece. She was just a child, and she loved children," said Mr Hossain."I saw her just the day before," he said. "If not for that after-school coaching, she'd be alive."In the chaos and heartbreak that followed the crash, moments of narrow escape and immense courage stood mother told BBC Bengali how she'd given her child money for tiffin instead of packing lunch that morning. During the break, he stepped out to buy food - and unknowingly avoided death by mere chance. "He is alive because I didn't give him tiffin," she parent's tragedy was unimaginable. He lost both his children within hours. His daughter died first. After burying her, he returned to the hospital only to wake from a brief nap and be told his young son, too, had died. And then there was Mahreen Chowdhury. The teacher, responsible for children in Classes 3 to 5, helped at least 20 students flee the inferno. Refusing to leave, she kept going back into the flames - until her body was burned over 80%. Chowdhury died a hero, saving the lives of those too young to save staff at the school, it's like living in a nightmare. "I can't function normally anymore. Every time I look at the building, a wave of grief crashes over me. I feel lost, unwell and depressed. I've lost three children I knew - one of them was my colleague's," said Shafiqul Islam Tultul, a 43-year-old Bengali teacher. In the aftermath, questions and confusion have swirled around the scale of the tragedy. The government has reported 29 deaths and more than 100 injuries, with seven victims still unidentified. However, the military's Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) puts the toll at to the Health Ministry, 69 people were injured in the crash and rescue efforts - including 41 students. Social media has buzzed with speculation about a possible cover-up, claims the Bangladesh Armed Forces have firmly denied. Meanwhile, the school's head teacher Khadija Akhter told BBC Bengali that families have reported five people still the eyewitnesses and survivors, the trauma lingers."I haven't slept for two days," Ahnaf says. "Every time I look outside, I feel like a fighter jet is coming at me. The screams are still in my ears."Fighter jets and commercial planes often fly over the campus, which lies close to Dhaka's international airport. "We're in the flight path," Ahnaf said. "We're used to seeing planes overhead - but we never imagined one would fall from the sky and strike us."Yet, the horrors of that day haunt him relentlessly. The screams, the fire, and the charred bodies of classmates and teachers refuse to fade."When I close my eyes, it's not darkness I see - it's smoke."
BBC News
4 days ago
- BBC News
Bangladesh plane crash: Teacher dies after rescuing 20 kids
"Those kids are my kids too," Mahreen Chowdhury told her husband as she lay dying in hours earlier, the teacher had been standing at the entrance to Milestone School and College in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, preparing to hand the second- to fifth-grade students over to their in a split second, what had been an unremarkable Monday lunchtime turned to horror.A Bangladesh Air Force fighter jet crashed into a two-storey building, bursting into - realising there were students still in the building's classrooms - ran back into the burning wreckage."I did my best to pull out about 20 to 25 people - as much as I could," Chowdhury's husband Mansur Helal recalls her saying, moments before she was put on ventilation at the intensive care unit of Dhaka's National Burn Institute. "I don't know what happened after that."Chowdhury died later on Monday: in the process of rescuing the children, she had suffered burns to almost 100% of her was among the at least 31 people killed in the accident - 25 of whom are children. Bangladesh's armed forces said that the F7 jet had experienced a mechanical fault after taking off for a training exercise just after 13:00 local time (07:00 GMT) on Monday, and that the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Md. Taukir Islam, had tried to steer to a less crowded area. He was among those crash marks the deadliest aviation disaster the country has seen in than 160 people were injured, with an on-duty doctor at the Uttara Adhunik Medical College Hospital saying most were aged between 10 and 15 years old, many suffering from jet fuel burns. More than 50, including children and adults, were taken to hospital with burns, a doctor at the National Institute of Burn and Plastic Surgery Helal told BBC Bangla that he first called his wife after hearing the news of the plane crash. When she didn't answer, he asked his eldest son to go to the school and find out what had after, he received a call from an ambulance driver telling him that his wife was being taken to the burns unit at Uttara Modern Medical Hospital. She would later be taken to the ICU. Mr Helal said Chowdhury apologised to him from her hospital bed, shortly before being placed on ventilation. As he recalled their final moments together, he broke down in tears."She was still alive. She spoke the highest words with great mental strength. Because almost its hundred percent burn inner and outer," he worked at Milestone School and College for 17 years, having first joined as a teacher before being promoted to become a coordinator in the Bangla department for classes two to was buried on Tuesday in her home district of Nilphamari, in northern Bangladesh, as flags flew at half mast across the country in a day of mourning for the victims. Muhammad Yunus, the leader of Bangladesh's interim government, has said that an investigation committee has been formed to look into the Dhaka on Tuesday, hundreds of protesting students took to the streets to demand an accurate death toll and the resignation of the education adviser – many of them breaking through the main gate of the federal government secretariat, according to local TV fired tear gas and used sound grenades to disperse the crowd, leaving dozens of people injured, witnesses protesters called for the crash victims to be named, as well as compensation for victims' families, the decommissioning of what they said were old and dangerous jets, and a change to air force training Bangladesh air disaster comes just weeks after neighbouring India witnessed the world's worst aviation disaster in a Air India passenger plane bound for London's Gatwick airport crashed shortly after taking off in Ahmedabad, western India, on 12 June, killing 260 crash killed 242 people on board the flight and 19 others on the ground, with only one survivor from the plane.
