Airline Accident in Bishkek

Sadly, there has been an Airline crash in Bishkek yesterday. We heard about it through German online news. But when we took a taxi this morning, of course, it was also on the local radio. It was a 29-year-old-plane on the way to Iran. Due to technical problems it crashed about 10 km off the Bishkek Manas Airport. The close by US-military base sent a rescue team of firefighters. Apparently about 70 people died and only 20 survived.

To read the full articles (in German) look here: Article in Spiegel-Online and Article in Tagesspiegel. Here is an English Article from NYT.

Now we "personally" have two connections to this accident (although luckily we don't know anyone, involved in it). On board was the Kyrgyz National Youth Basketball Team - 17 people. The news say only 7 of them have survived. The team seems to belong to the 29th school district, which is only one block away from us and many kids from our neighborhood also go to this school. I wonder, if we know anyone, who lost friends in this horrible accident...

The second connection is, that on Friday (see last post) we had gotten to know two firefighters from the US-military base. We had been joking about their job, because they said themselves, that there are not many fires around and that they spend more time on training, working out and beer drinking than putting out fires. I don't know, if those two were actually part of the rescue team, but now I feel bad about joking around...