ANKARA: All 20 personnel on board a military cargo plane that crashed in Georgia were killed, Turkey's defense minister announced on Wednesday.
The C-130 plane had taken off from Azerbaijan and was on its way back to Turkey when it crashed Tuesday in Georgia’s Sighnaghi municipality, close to the Azerbaijani border.
“Our heroic comrades-in-arms were martyred on November 11, 2025, when our C-130 military cargo plane, which had taken off from Azerbaijan en route to our country, crashed near the Georgia-Azerbaijan border,” Defense Minister Yasar Guler said in a message posted on X, together with photographs of the military personnel that were killed.
The cause of the crash is being investigated.
A Turkish accident investigation team reached the crash site early on Wednesday and was inspecting the wreckage of the plane that had spread over a very large area, Turkish broadcaster Haberturk reported.
On Tuesday, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency quoted the Georgian aviation authority as saying that contact with the plane was lost a few minutes after it had entered Georgia’s airspace. The plane had not issued a distress signal, it said.
C-130 military cargo planes are widely used by Turkey’s armed forces for transporting personnel and handling logistical operations.
Turkey and Azerbaijan maintain close military cooperation.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Turkish officials had attended Azerbaijan’s Victory Day celebrations in Baku on Nov. 8, marking Azerbaijan’s military success over Armenia in the 2020 control of Karabakh region, known internationally as Nagorno-Karabakh, a conflict that had lasted nearly four decades.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Georgian Foreign Minister Maka Botchorishvili extended their condolences to their Turkish counterparts over Tuesday's crash.
“We are deeply shocked by the news of the loss of life of our soldiers in the accident that occurred on Georgian soil,” Aliyev said in a message, according to the Anadolu Agency.