A passenger jet crashed into the hills surrounding Pakistan’s capital amid poor weather yesterday, killing all 152 people on board and blazing a path of devastation strewn with body parts and twisted metal wreckage.
Initial reports from the Interior Ministry which said that five people survived the Airblue crash were wrong, said Imtiaz Elahi, chairman of the Capital Development Authority, which deals with emergencies and reports to the ministry.
“The situation at the site of the crash is heartbreaking,” Elahi said. “It is a great tragedy, and I confirm it with pain that there are no survivors.”
Local TV footage showed twisted metal wreckage hanging from trees and scattered across the ground on a bed of broken branches. Fire was visible and smoke rose from the scene as a helicopter hovered above. The army said it was sending special troops to aid the search.
“I’m seeing only body parts,” Dawar Adnan, a rescue worker with the Pakistan Red Crescent, said by telephone from the crash site. “This is a very horrible scene. We have scanned almost all the area, but there is no chance of any survivors.”
The search effort was hampered by muddy conditions and smoldering wreckage that authorities were having trouble extinguishing by helicopter, Adnan said.
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Pakistani Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar said the government does not suspect terrorism.
The plane left the southern city of Karachi at 7:45am for a two-hour scheduled flight to Islamabad and was trying to land during cloudy and rainy weather, Pervez George, a civil aviation official said.
Airblue is a private service based in Karachi and yesterday’s flight was believed to be carrying mostly Pakistanis.
However, the dead included two US citizens, the spokesman for the US embassy in Islamabad, Richard Snelsire, said without providing further details.
Rescue workers scouring the heavily forested hills recovered 50 bodies from the wreckage, said Ramzan Sajid, spokesman for the Capital Development Authority.
“The plane was about to land at the Islamabad airport when it lost contact with the control tower, and later we learned that the plane had crashed,” said George, adding the model was an Airbus 321 and the flight number was ED202.
The crash site covered a large area on both sides of the hills, including a section behind Faisal Mosque, one of Islamabad’s most prominent landmarks, and not far from the Daman-e-Koh resort.
At the Islamabad airport, hundreds of friends and relatives of those on board the flight swarmed ticket counters desperately seeking information. A large cluster of people also surrounded a passenger list posted near the Airblue ticket counter.
George said 146 passengers were on the flight along with six crew members.
The Pakistan Airline Pilot Association said the plane appeared to have strayed off course, possibly because of the poor weather.
Airblue spokesman Raheel Ahmed said an investigation would be launched into the cause of the crash. The plane had no known technical issues and the pilots did not send any emergency signals, Ahmed said.
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