An Afghan passenger jet with more than 100 people on board was missing and feared crashed after it failed to land at Kabul airport or turn up in neighboring Pakistan, where a company official said it had been diverted due to bad weather. The Kam Air Boeing 737 took off Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat bound for the capital, Kabul, but was unable to land because of a strong snowstorm, said Feda Mohammed Fedayi, the airline's deputy director. Fedayi said the plane was diverted to an airport in Pakistan, possibly the border city of Peshawar, but that as of Friday morning the company had no word on whether it landed safely. Pakistani aviation officials told The Associated Press on Friday that the plane never entered their airspace. ``We have information that a plane went missing on the Herat-Kabul route but no plane has entered Pakistani territory and no plane has made contact with any air control tower,'' said Abid Rao, deputy chief of Civil Aviation for Pakistan. ``We have checked all of our stations.''
| Foul play or are they emulating Air Ukraine? |
| My initial suspicion would be foul play... |
UPDATE: KABUL (Reuters) - The wreckage of an Afghan airliner that went missing with 104 people on board was found Friday near the capital, Kabul, a day after it was turned away because of heavy snow, a Western security source said. The Kam Air Boeing 737 was found to the northeast of the capital, but the security source did not say if there were any survivors. NATO troops and helicopters have been searching for the plane, which was on a flight from the western city of Herat to Kabul Thursday when it went missing after being turned away from Kabul airport. At least seven of the 96 passengers were foreigners and six of the eight crew members were from Kyrgyzstan, Kam Air deputy director Feda Mohammed Fedayi said. The foreigners included three American women working for a Massachusetts-based company, Management Sciences for Health, its Kabul representative William Schiffbauer said. "We don't know if there were any survivors," the security source said, adding that the passengers included five international aid workers and nine Turkish nationals. Deputy Interior Minister Shah Mahmoud Miakhel told Reuters earlier the plane may not have had sufficient fuel to enable it to fly as far as an airport in Pakistan. "It did not have so much fuel to enable it to fly far," he said. | Not enough fuel to divert, ran out of time, gas and options |
Kam Air financial controller Zimarai Kamgar said the aircraft had contacted Peshawar airport in northwestern Pakistan about an hour after it was turned away from Kabul at about 4 p.m. (11:30 a.m. GMT) Thursday. "It was given clearance to land, but it never arrived," Kamgar told Reuters. Kam Air opened as Afghanistan's only private airline in November 2003. It flies leased aircraft between Kabul and Dubai and Istanbul and operates several domestic routes. In September, an Antonov-24 operated by the airline went off the runway while landing in Kabul, slightly injuring some of the 27 passengers aboard, apparently after engine trouble. |