MANILA – A Philippine Air Force aircraft with 96 soldiers and crew on board crashed on the southern island of Jolo on Sunday, officials said. At least 31 people were killed, including two civilians on the ground, and it was feared that the number would rise.
The chief of the Philippine Armed Forces, General Cirilito Sobejana, said the plane missed a runway while attempting to land and crashed near a village called Bangkal in the city of Patikul, a stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf militant group.
Major General William Gonzales, the commander of Joint Task Force Sulu, said 50 people have been hospitalized and that “29 bodies have already been recovered from the scene of the accident.”
“We remain confident that we can find more survivors,” General Gonzales said in a statement. “Our search and rescue operations are still ongoing, 17 people are not known.”
Military officials said that in addition to the two civilians killed on the ground, four others were injured.
In addition to the 96 people on board the aircraft, a C-130 Hercules, there were also five military vehicles, officials said. The C-130, a US-built turboprop, is used by the military around the world and is sometimes kept in service for decades.
Defense Minister Delfin Lorenzana said he had “ordered a full investigation to get to the bottom of the incident once the rescue and recovery operation is complete”.
The plane, which crashed on Sunday, first flew in 1988 and was used by the United States Air Force until it was sold to the Philippines in January, according to the Philippine Air Force and a website that tracks C-130s around the world.
The Filipino military has tried to modernize its aging fleet. Last month, a newly acquired Black Hawk helicopter crashed during a night training flight, killing six people on board.
This crash occurred about two months after another helicopter, an MG-520 attack helicopter, crashed in the central Philippines, killing its pilot. And in January, a refurbished Vietnam War-era UH-1H helicopter crashed in the south, killing seven soldiers.
In 2008, a Philippine Air Force C-130 crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from Davao City on the southern island of Mindanao, killing nine crew members and two passengers on board.
The soldiers on the plane that crashed on Sunday were flown to Jolo to support the military’s operations against Abu Sayyaf, a small Islamist group that the Philippine government regards as a terrorist organization.
A faction of Abu Sayyaf sworn allegiance to the Islamic State has been blamed for the January 2019 bombing of a cathedral on Jolo, carried out by an Indonesian couple that killed at least 23 people. Filipino authorities believe a similar attack near the cathedral in 2020, killing 14, was carried out by the same Abu Sayyaf faction. Its leader, Hatib Hajan Zavadjaan, has reportedly been killed since then, and the military has stepped up operations against the group in hopes of eliminating them.
Austin Ramzy contributed the coverage from Hong Kong.
