TaronAvia aviation services company declines to comment on reports that the cargo plane, which crashed in South Sudan, belonged to this company.

The company’s office in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, told Armenian News-NEWS.am to ask TaronAvia proprietor Garnik Papikyan for a comment on this matter.

We are attempting to contact Papikyan for the past several days, but he is not answering the phone calls.

According to various sources, the TaronAvia owner is now in South Sudan. The company said to check this information also with Garnik Papikyan.

Press secretary of the Armenian government-affiliated General Department of Civil Aviation, Ruben Grdzelyan, had told Armenian News-NEWS.am that the Soviet-era Antonov-12 transport plane that crashed has no Armenian registration, and the airlines that are registered in Armenia have no such aircraft. 

Armenian News-NEWS.am had learned that this cargo plane belonged to Garnik Papikyan, who is the proprietor of the TaronAvia aviation services company.

We also managed to find out that Papikyan himself had reached an arrangement with the Armenian pilots and the other crewmembers of this plane, and taken them to work in Africa.

Dozens of people, including the aircraft’s crewmembers and passengers as well as people on the ground, were killed in Wednesday’s crash in South Sudan.

The cargo plane’s crewmembers included Armenians. They were First Pilot and aircraft commander Gevorg Tovmasyan, Second Pilot Samvel Hambardzumyan, Engineer Samvel Mkrtchyan, and Technicians Armen Antonyan, and Suren Petrosyan.