Polish Military Plane Crash Kills 20

Twenty members of the Polish military have been killed after their plane crashed on the way back from a flight safety conference.

Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, said the accident, which occurred as the plane was about to land yesterday evening, was a "huge loss for the Polish air force".

"Soldiers, husbands and fathers have died, and that is the most tragic result of this catastrophe," said Tusk, who had rushed to the site of the accident.

The plane, carrying 16 passengers, including a brigadier general, a colonel and four crew members, was approaching an air force runway at Miroslawiec shortly after 7pm local time (6pm GMT) when it crashed.

The Spanish-built CASA C-295M military transport plane was about 3km from the airstrip when it clipped trees on its approach, crashed in a wooded area and burst into flames, officials said.

Tusk said rescue workers were still looking for the black box in their effort to find out what went wrong. The plane had more people on board when it took off from Warsaw, but had already landed at three other military airports - in Powidz, Poznan and Krzesiny - to return soldiers to their home bases.

It had been scheduled to make one more stop, in Swidwin, before returning to its base in Krakow. Polish media described the accident as the worst military disaster in more than three decades.

President Lech Kaczynski was cutting short his trip to Croatia to return to Poland today.

The Polish parliament postponed its planned daily session and a mass was planned at Warsaw's military church later in the day.

Among those killed were Brig Gen Andrzej Andrzejewski, commander of an air brigade based in Swidwin, as well as the commander of the Miroslawiec airbase, Col Jerzy Pilat.

A Polish military expert, Grzegorz Holdanowicz, said it was the first air disaster involving a CASA C-295M, a plane he called one of the safest in the Polish air force. The Polish military also uses the plane type in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where it supports the US-led operations.