On Sunday, a private jet that had been pursued by NATO jets crashed into the Baltic Sea off the coast of Latvia.
According to Flightradar24, a website that tracks international aviation traffic, the Cessna Citation 551, which was registered in Austria, took off from Jerez, Spain at 12:56 UTC (8:56am ET) and was headed for Cologne, Germany.
However, according to Artis Pabriks, the deputy prime minister and defence minister of Latvia, it went down in the vicinity of the city of Ventspils. He added that the Latvian military was involved in a search and rescue operation.
The German daily Bild said that the plane had four persons on board, including the pilot, a man, a woman, and a person Bild characterised as a daughter, without going into further detail. The aircraft was approved for single-pilot flights.
A Cessna 551 Citation II/SP, like the one that crashed, as seen in a file photo at Düsseldorf Airport in Germany in 2021.
Spanish officials informed the French aviation police, who also halted and accompanied the flight, “of probable challenges of pressurisation of the aircraft,” according to a statement from the French armed forces ministry.
Latvia claimed to have dispatched ships to the area.
A Swedish helicopter and an aeroplane participated in the rescue effort in Latvian waters after the plane passed over the Swedish island of Gotland, according to Lars Antonsson of Sweden’s Maritime and Air Rescue Center, who spoke to CNN affiliate Expressen.
Although search crews have retrieved some of the jet, according to Antonsson, “no survivors have been found.”
