Bangladesh air force jet crashes into school, killing at least 19

A Bangladeshi air force jet crashed into a school campus in the capital, Dhaka, on Monday, killing at least 19 people, the government’s media office said. More than 100 were injured, 68 critically, fire service spokesman Muhammed Shajahan Sikder wrote on X.

Most of the victims were students at the Milestone School and College in the neighborhood of Uttara, the media office said. According to the school’s website, it has thousands of students from pre-kindergarden through high school across multiple sites. The media office said in a statement that the FT-7 BGI fighter jet crashed after a “technical malfunction” shortly after takeoff. The “mechanical failure” is under investigation, the statement said.

Visuals of the crash site showed firefighters dousing the charred remains of what appeared to be an aircraft engine, lodged inside a blackened building. Paramedics could be seen carrying the injured on stretchers as a large rescue effort unfolded.

Monday’s crash was one of the deadliest in Bangladesh’s history. In 1984, 49 people were killed when a passenger jet crashed as it attempted to land during a severe rainstorm at the Dhaka airport, plunging into a marsh and leaving no survivors.

In May last year, a Bangladeshi air force training aircraft crashed into a river in Chattogram, the country’s second-largest city. According to local media, a squadron leader was killed in the crash.