4 hours ago
5
At least 20 people were killed and nearly 200 injured – many of them children – when a Bangladeshi fighter jet on a routine training exercise crashed into a school in Dhaka in the country’s worst aviation disaster in decades.
The jet, a Chinese-made F-7BGI, hit the private Milestone school in the capital as students were ending or had left afternoon classes, witnesses said. It reportedly struck a five-storey academic building before crashing on to a two-storey structure on the campus, triggering a massive explosion and fire.
Videos of the aftermath of the crash showed a big fire near a lawn, emitting a thick plume of smoke into the sky, as crowds watched from a distance. The Bangladeshi air force said the jet had experienced a mechanical failure.
Ahmed, a secondary-age student at Milestone, which takes pupils from kindergarten to senior secondary, told the Guardian: “I was eating at the school canteen when I suddenly heard a deafening noise. I saw the plane hit the building and then fall on to a smaller structure. It caught fire instantly. People were screaming and running. Flames engulfed many of the younger students.”
“Never in my life have I seen death so closely … The fire, the smoke, the panic – these sounds are now etched into my memory. In an instant, our school became a place of death.”
Mizanur Rahman, a teacher, said he believed the pilot had attempted to steer the plane away from crowded areas: “Our campus is large and lively, with open spaces. I was standing close to the crash site. Judging by the trajectory, it looked like the pilot was trying to reach the field behind the buildings – but probably didn’t make it. He even seemed to aim for one of the smaller structures when he was unsuccessful steering towards the field.”
Rahman said many younger pupils were playing outside classrooms as the school day neared its end. “After the plane hit, there was a massive blast and an inferno swept through the surrounding area, engulfing the children. Some of our teachers and staff are still missing.”
Images from the scene also showed people screaming and crying as others tried to comfort them.
Bangladesh’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), representing the armed forces, said the fighter jet had developed a mechanical failure shortly after takeoff at 1.06 pm and crashed minutes later. The Uttara neighbourhood where the crash occurred is a densely populated part of northern Dhaka, a city of more than 20 million people.
ISPR said a high-level investigation committee had been formed by the Bangladesh air force to determine the exact cause. Officials have confirmed that the pilot, Flt Lt Md Towkir Islam, is among the dead.
Over the past two decades, Bangladesh has suffered multiple plane crashes involving military and civilian training flights, with at least 15 fatalities – though none approached the scale of Monday’s disaster. Most previous incidents involved only military flight crew.
The deadliest happened in 1984 when a plane flying from Chattogram to Dhaka crashed, killing all 49 on board.
The interim government of Muhammad Yunus announced a day of national mourning on Tuesday.
Yunus expressed “deep grief and sorrow” over the incident in a post on X.
“The loss suffered by the Air Force, the students, parents, teachers, and staff of Milestone School and College, as well as others affected by this accident, is irreparable,” he said.
“This is a moment of profound pain for the nation.”
The government has declared a day of mourning on Tuesday, where the national flag will be flown at half mast across all government and educational establishments and at Bangladeshi missions abroad. Special prayers will be held at places of worship across the country.
The incident comes a little over a month after an Air India plane crashed on top of a medical college hostel in Ahmedabad in neighbouring India, killing 241 of the 242 people onboard and 19 on the ground, making it the world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade.
