A SLOVAK military airplane that was transporting soldiers from the south Serbian province of Kosovo to eastern Slovakia's Košice crashed into a mountain near to the Slovak-Hungarian border last evening, killing 42 people.
The plane crashed 250 kilometres from the Hungarian capital Budapest and just 20 km from the Slovak base in Košice where the troops were headed.
The Slovak Defence Ministry said that most of the people on the aircraft were from the KFOR peacekeeping mission in Kosovo.
PM Mikuláš Dzurinda held a late-night press conference and said that the Slovak and Hungarian rescuers had done their best to save lives. Slovak officials established a crisis team immediately after the accident.
Rescue efforts were complicated by the cold and the inaccessibilty of the area.
