Via Daily Pundit
A chartered Cessna aircraft carrying an Afghan minister and seven others crashed into the sea off Pakistan Monday and all aboard were feared dead, the Pakistani navy said. Navy spokesman Commander Roshan Khayal said the wreckage of the plane had been found about 30 nautical miles from the southern port city of Karachi in the second crash in Pakistani territory in less than a week. "We have recovered four dead bodies. I cannot confirm their identity. The search for others is still in progress," Khayal told Reuters. On board was Afghan Minister for Petroleum and Mines Juma Mohammad Mohammadi who had held talks in Pakistan at the weekend on a major pipeline project that would link Turkmenistan and Pakistan via Afghanistan. Others aboard the aircraft included several other Afghan officials, an official of Pakistan's foreign ministry and Sun Chang Sheng, chief executive of MCC Resource Development Co, a Chinese pipeline firm, said an official with Star Air Aviation, which chartered the aircraft from a private relief agency. He said the aircraft was a Cessna 402 that took off from Karachi at 8:10 a.m. local time.
Speaking in Kuala Lumpur, where he was attending a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed shock at the news. "This is a shocking thing and it is sad news," Karzai told Reuters. "We have lost a fine qualified Afghan minister if the news is true. And we are very sorry for that."
The Edhi Welfare Foundation, a private Pakistani charitable group, said its plane went missing over Cape Monz, near Karachi. Abdul Sattar Edhi, the head of the Edhi Welfare Foundation, said the plane had been due to land at an airport in Baluchistan province at 11:15 a.m. local time. Edhi flies small aircraft for relief and air ambulance operations. A Cessna 402 is a twin-propeller aircraft capable of carrying up to eight people.
| Knowing there's a "charitable group" involved always makes me suspicious... |
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