Afghan and Nato forces launched a ground and air search on Friday for an Afghan passenger jet carrying 104 people after it disappeared from radar screens during a snowstorm near the mountain-ringed capital.
The Kam Air Boeing 737-200 took off on Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat, bound for Kabul, but was unable to land because of bad weather. The airline initially said the plane was diverted to neighbouring Pakistan, but officials there said it never entered their airspace.
”The last time that we have been told that the aircraft was seen on radar was about 3,1 miles [5km] east of Kabul,” Afghan Transport Minister Enayatullah Qasemi said at a news conference. ”Since this morning we have begun a search-and-rescue operation in the area.”
Kam Air president Zamarai Kamgar said there were 96 passengers on board, including seven foreigners. However, two foreign companies said they were missing a total of nine staff — six Turks and three Americans.
Kamgar said the eight-strong crew included six Russians and two Afghans.
Kabul is surrounded by snowcapped mountains, raising the hazards for planes flying in bad weather. The area near the border is so remote that officials suspect militants, including Osama bin Laden, have hidden there since the fall of Afghanistan’s former Taliban government in 2001.
Still, the clouds had lifted by Friday afternoon, improving the prospects of finding and reaching any survivors if the plane had crashed.
Defense ministry spokesperson General Mohammed Zahir Azimi said hundreds of Afghan troops were heading for Khaki Jabar, a district south-east of Kabul with few roads and steep ridges rising to more than 4 000m, but they had yet to find any wreckage.
The private airline’s mainly domestic flights are popular with Afghans wealthy enough to avoid long journeys over bumpy roads, and are also used by aid and reconstruction workers.
Kurtulus Ergin, manager of a Turkish road contractor called Gulsan-Cukurova, said six Turkish employees had been on board the plane.
Three others were American women working for Management Sciences for Health, a firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said William Schiffbauer, a company representative in Kabul.
A United States embassy spokesperson said officials were still checking on how many Americans were on board.
Qasemi said the pilot last contacted the Kabul control tower at about 3pm on Thursday to ask for a weather update and was cleared for landing by Bagram air base moments before the jet disappeared from radar screens.
He said officials had checked with local air fields and those in neighbouring countries without finding any trace of the plane.
Nato, whose 8 000-strong peacekeeping force is based in Kabul, was leading the search using Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, dozens of ground troops and an unmanned drone, spokesperson Major Karen Tissot van Patot said. Afghan police and troops also joined the rescue mission.
The last major plane crash in Afghanistan was on November 27 last year, when a transport plane under contract to the US military crashed in central Bamiyan province, killing three American soldiers and three American civilian crew.
The most recent commercial crash was on March 19 1998, when an Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 slammed into a mountain near Kabul, killing all 45 passengers and crew.
Kam Air was the first private airline established in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and made its maiden flight on the Kabul-Herat route in November 2003. The airline operates a fleet of leased Boeing and Antonov aircraft on domestic Afghan routes as well as to Dubai. — Sapa-AP