HUNGARY: Emergency crews battled freezing conditions yesterday to reach the wreckage of a military aircraft that crashed in remote northeastern Hungary, killing all but one of its 43 passengers.
The Antonov-24, which was carrying Slovak peacekeepers home from duty in Kosovo, plunged into a snow-covered hillside on Thursday night, cutting a swathe through trees as it disintegrated and exploded.
Slovak officials said 27 soldiers were killed, along with eight support staff and seven flight crew, and described the survival of one officer with only slight injuries as "miraculous".
The call made by the survivor, Martin Farkas (27), a first lieutenant serving with about 100 other Slovaks in the Nato peacekeeping force in Kosovo, confirmed the fears of air-traffic controllers who had seen the aircraft disappear from radar screens at about 7.30pm local time, as it prepared to cross from Hungary into Slovakia.
"He told me that the aircraft had crashed and was on fire and was somewhere in the forest," his wife, Michaela Farkasova, told Slovak television.
"He said he was alive but covered in blood, and to alert the rescue services and police. Then the line went dead."
Lieut Farkas trudged through knee-deep snow on a bitterly cold night before being found by a Hungarian ambulance and transferred to a hospital in Kosice, the city on the Slovak side of the border that was the doomed aircraft's destination.
Peter Belus, the head of the hospital's intensive care unit, said that Lieut Farkas had arrived in a state of shock but conscious, suffering concussion and multiple bruises.
He was now in a medically induced coma to aid recovery, he added.
"With no complications, his health could be back to normal within 15 days," said Dr Belus. "In view of the fact that I hear reports of more than 40 people dead, the injuries he sustained are minimal. This is a miracle."
But hopes of finding other survivors were quickly dashed.
"It's minus 18 degrees Celsius here. The plane's fuselage is completely burnt out," said local police spokesman Laszlo Garamvolgyi.
"It is absolutely inconceivable that there could be other survivors."
Tibor Dobson, a spokesman for Hungary's interior ministry, said the remote crash site, hostile weather and sheer violence of the crash were hampering the efforts of hundreds of rescue workers to find and identify the dead.
"Imagine the difficulty of our work," he said. "We are trying to identify victims whose bodies were scattered over a very large area. And that's often from just a body part."
Eyewitnesses described the carnage on the snowy hillside. Rescue worker Peter Kormos spoke of a "gruesome scene at the site of the accident. There were pools of blood all over."
"The pilot flew along the set flight path," said Slovak Air Force commander Juraj Baranek. "The only problem was that he started descending too early."
Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda has declared that Monday will be a day of mourning for the country.
"I imagine what the wives, the children, the fathers of the soldiers who were serving their country are feeling," he said during an emergency cabinet meeting.
The Soviet-built, propeller-driven AN-24 is still a military workhorse for many of the former Warsaw Pact states that, like Slovakia, are now members of Nato.