Germany's foreign minister has said the deadly crash of a DHL cargo plane near the Lithuanian capital's airport could have been an accident or a "hybrid incident" with outside involvement.
"We must now seriously ask ourselves whether this was an accident or whether it was another hybrid incident," Annalena Baerbock told reporters at a G7 foreign ministers' meeting in Italy, alluding to the recent severing of cables in the Baltic Sea that officials have said could have been sabotage.
It comes after Ms Baerbock said Germany is working with Lithuania and Spain to investigate the plane crash near Vilnius airport, adding that a string of hybrid attacks on people and infrastructure has left Europe on alert.
"The German authorities are working very closely with the Lithuanian authorities to get to the bottom of this," she added.
A DHL cargo plane crashed as it came in to land at Lithuania's Vilnius airport this morning, killing one person on the aircraft and with some debris damaging a house.
The three other people onboard were injured but no one on the ground was hurt, officials said. Flames and smoke engulfed the crashed plane as fire crews worked to extinguish the blaze.
The scheduled flight was operated by airline Swiftair on behalf of DHL and had taken off from Leipzig, Germany.
The Boeing 737-400 crashed around 3.30am Irish time while approaching Vilnius airport for landing, a spokesperson for Lithuania's National Crisis Management Centre said.
The flight had departed from Leipzig at 2.08am, Flightradar24 said.
Rescue services said the plane hit the ground, split into pieces and slid over 100m. Some debris hit a house, whose 14 occupants were later evacuated.
In a statement, DHL said the plane "made a forced landing" about one kilometre from Vilnius airport and that the cause of the crash was still unknown.
"In the recording of the conversation between the pilots and the tower, the pilots, until the very last second did not tell the tower of any extraordinary event," said Marius Baranauskas, head of the Lithuanian National Aviation Authority.
"We need to examine the black boxes to know what was happening in the aircraft," he said.
Swiftair said the plane went down in a residential area near Vilnius airport, and that it had set up a call centre to assist the relatives of those affected.
Lithuanian police and prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into the incident, and a specialised unit in the Justice Ministry will carry out a civil aviation incident probe, the government said.
"Only these investigations will answer questions on the real reasons of the incident, speculations and guesses will really not help to determine the truth", Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said in a statement.
A Lithuanian police spokesperson said one person onboard, a Spanish citizen, was killed and three others - Spanish, German and Lithuanian citizens - were injured.
Firefighters poured water onto the smoking building some 1.3km north of the airport runway and nearby streets were cordoned off.
DHL has launched its own investigation into the crash, a spokesperson for the company's Lithuanian arm said.
"The aircraft contained regular parcels. We do not have any information that any of them were suspicious," she said.
A European Union Aviation Safety Agency spokesperson said it was too early to comment on the causes of the crash.
The 737-400 aircraft involved in the accident was 31 years old, according to a Flightradar24 database.
Boeing was working to gather more information and would provide any support, a Boeing spokesperson said.
Swiftair declined to comment.
Germany is already investigating several fires caused by incendiary devices hidden inside parcels at a warehouse in Leipzig earlier this year.
British police are investigating a warehouse fire in Birmingham in July, caused by a package catching alight, and liaising with other European law enforcement agencies to see if there was a connection with similar incidents elsewhere.
