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MILITARY

Stunt pilot killed as Spain’s ‘Eagle Patrol’ military plane crashes at sea

A Spanish military plane crashed on Monday off the southeastern coast and the pilot was killed.

Published: 26 August 2019 12:58 CEST
Stunt pilot killed as Spain's 'Eagle Patrol' military plane crashes at sea
The plane was part of the Patrulla Águila acrobatic squad of the Spanish Air Force. Photo: MINISTERIO DE DEFENSA

The C-101 — the same aircraft used by Spain's air force Eagle Patrol aerobatics team — was on a “training flight” when it crashed near the resort of La Manga at 9.36am on Monday, a statement said.

At first reports suggested that the flight instructor on board the plane may have been “able to eject before the plane crashed in the sea” and rescue services were dispatched to search for him, the defence ministry said.

But emergency services in Murcia later confirmed that they had found the lifeless body of the pilot among the wreckage.

He was named as Francisco Marín Núñez.

 

A video filmed by a witness and posted on Twitter shows a small aircraft falling at a near vertical before trying to straighten up and hurtling into the water.   

?Confirmado el fallecimiento del piloto de avión del Ejército del Aire

⚫️Aún llegan restos del avión a la costa de La Manga del Mar Menor pic.twitter.com/8TrOJv9yS1

— Alejandro Melgares (@elentrometido) August 26, 2019

 

The plane came down near an air base outside the town of San Javier just off Galúa beach.

READ ALSO: German family among seven dead in mid-air collision in Mallorca 

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NATO

Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday he would back Sweden's Nato candidacy if the European Union resumes long-stalled membership talks with Ankara.

Published: 10 July 2023 12:35 CEST
Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

“First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland,” Erdogan told a televised media appearance, before departing for the NATO summit in Lithuania.

Erdogan said “this is what I told” US President Joe Biden when the two leaders spoke by phone on Sunday.

Turkey first applied to be a member of the European Economic Community — a predecessor to the EU — in 1987. It became an EU candidate country in 1999 and formally launched membership negotiations with the bloc in 2005.

The talks stalled in 2016 over European concerns about Turkish human rights violations.

“I would like to underline one reality. Turkey has been waiting at the EU’s front door for 50 years,” Erdogan said. “Almost all the NATO members are EU members. I now am addressing these countries, which are making Turkey wait for more than 50 years, and I will address them again in Vilnius.”

Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is due to meet Erdogan at 5pm on Monday in a last ditch attempt to win approval for the country’s Nato bid ahead of Nato’s summit in Vilnius on July 11th and 12th. 

Turkey has previously explained its refusal to back Swedish membership as motivated by the country’s harbouring of people connected to the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group, and the Gülen movement, who Erdogan blames for an attempted coup in 2016. 

More recently, he has criticised Sweden’s willingness to allow pro-Kurdish groups to protest in Swedish cities and allow anti-Islamic protesters to burn copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

In a sign of the likely reaction of counties which are members both of Nato and the EU, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the two issues should not be connected. 

“Sweden meets all the requirements for Nato membership,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is not connected with it and that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue.”

Malena Britz, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, told public broadcaster SVT that Erdogan’s new gambit will have caught Sweden’s negotiators, the EU, and even Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg off guard. 

“I think both the member states and Stoltenberg had expected this to be about Nato and not about what the EU is getting up to,” she said. “That’s not something Nato even has any control over. If Erdogan sticks to the idea that Turkey isn’t going to let Sweden into Nato until Turkey’s EU membership talks start again, then Sweden and Nato will need to think about another solution.” 

Aras Lindh, a Turkey expert at the Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs, agreed that the move had taken Nato by surprise. 

“This came suddenly. I find it hard to believe that anything like this will become reality, although there could possibly be some sort of joint statement from the EU countries. I don’t think that any of the EU countries which are also Nato members were prepared for this issue.”

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