A plane carrying 47
people, including one of Pakistan’s most famous singers, has crashed on its
approach to Islamabad from Chitral, a mountainous region popular with
tourists.
Pakistan
International Airlines (PIA) said a small turboprop ATR-42 had lost contact
with aircraft controllers shortly before police confirmed that an aircraft had
crashed near the town of Havelian.
Havelian lies 30
miles north of the capital’s airport and far away from the high peaks of the
Hindu Kush mountain range in which Chitral is nestled.
The army said it had
dispatched troops and helicopters to the scene, but an official told Reuters
there were unlikely to be any survivors. “All of the bodies are burned beyond
recognition. The debris is scattered,” said Taj Muhammad Khan. Images shown on
Pakistani TV channels and circulated on social media showed a trail of wreckage
engulfed in flames on a mountain slope.
The military said 21
bodies had been recovered.
Kurshid Tanoli, a
police official in Havelian, said recovery work was hampered by a fire at the
crash site and the hilly terrain.
“The nearest village
to the site is Batolani and is deep in the hills,” he said. “Vehicles and
ambulances can only go to Batolani and then it is a 30-minute walk.”
A manifest for
flight PK661, obtained by local media, showed that in addition to five crew
there were 42 passengers on board, including Junaid Jamshed, a pop star turned
evangelical Muslim cleric and fashion designer, who ran a successful chain of
boutiques across the country.
Jamshed had
abandoned his music career after becoming a follower of the Tableeghi Jamaat, a
highly conservative, proselytising Islamic movement. Quaid-e-Azam, manager of
the Hindukush Heights hotel in Chitral, said Jamshed had been in the town as
part of a preaching tour.
Also on board,
according to the manifest, was Osama Warraich, the senior civilian bureaucrat
for Chitral, who was travelling to Islamabad with his wife and son.
Pakistan’s last
major air disaster was in 2015 when a military
helicopter crashed in a remote northern valley, killing eight people
including the Norwegian, Philippine and Indonesian envoys and the wives of
Malaysian and Indonesian envoys.
The country’s
deadliest crash was in 2010, when an Airbus 321 operated by the private airline
Airblue and flying from Karachi crashed into hills
outside Islamabad while about to land, killing all 152 on
board.
The government has
vowed to privatise troubled PIA, the national carrier, which has been losing
money.
(Source: GUARDIAN)
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