ANKARA (AP) – Turkey held a military funeral ceremony Sunday morning for five Libyan officers, including western Libya’s military chief, who died in a plane crash earlier this week.
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 Ankara, Turkey’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.
Sunday’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. The five caskets, each wrapped in a Libyan national flag, were then loaded onto a plane to be returned to their home country.
Turkey’s military chief, Selcuk Bayraktaroglu, was also on the plane headed to Libya, state-run news agency TRT reported.
The bodies recovered from the crash site were kept at the Ankara Forensic Medicine Institute for identification. Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc told reporters their DNA was compared to family members who joined a 22-person delegation that arrived from Libya after the crash.
Tunc also said Germany was asked to help examine the jet’s black boxes as an impartial third party
Libya plunged into chaos after the country’s 2011 uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The country split, with rival administrations in the east and west, backed by an array of rogue militias and different foreign governments.
Turkey has been the main backer of Libya’s government in the west, but has recently taken steps to improve ties with the eastern-based government as well.
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