Military plane crashes in Turkey

The Casa CN-235 is partly built by the Turkish army

A Turkish military cargo plane has crashed killing, all 34 people on board.

The aircraft came down near the town of Malatya in eastern Turkey.

General staff headquarters said the Casa CN-235 was carrying 31 members of the special forces from the city of Diyarbakir to the capital, Ankara.

A military official said the aircraft crashed due to a technical malfunction.

But witnesses in Malatya, about 660km (410 miles) east of Ankara, said they saw the plane explode in mid-air and fall from the sky in flames.

Diyarbakir is at the centre of a region which is under emergency rule because of a long-running military campaign against Kurdish rebels.

More than 30,000 people are estimated to have died in the conflict since 1984, though the region has been relatively quiet recently.

Black box missing

There has been no immediate indication as to the cause of the crash.

"It was all over when we reached the crash site with the fire brigade. There are only bits of bodies," Bayram Karaaslan, the mayor of Akcadag, a town near the crash site, told CNN Turk television.

"It does not look like a plane. There's a suggestion it might have exploded in the air but it's not certain," Mr Karaaslan said,

Rescue teams have so far recovered the bodies of 18 people, and reports say that the authorities are still looking for the plane's black box.

An aircraft of the same type, built in part by the Turkish military, crashed during a training flight in January, killing three people.