Pakistan plane with more than 40 aboard crashes in mountains

By Shaiq Hussain and Brian Murphy

The Washington Post

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Pakistan International Airlines passenger plane with at least 48 people aboard crashed into a mountainside Wednesday in northern Pakistan, leaving a trail of flaming wreckage across a steep slope. There was no sign of survivors, officials said.

Pakistan’s military said the remains of at least 26 victims were recovered as crews combed the rugged crash site about 45 miles northwest of Islamabad, the flight’s destination.

A security official said body parts were scattered over a wide area. “There is no body in complete form,” added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief media.

“I saw arms, legs and flesh of the dead bodies on the ground,” the official said. “There is no chance of any survivor.”

The spokesman for Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority, Pervez George, said the cause of the crash was not yet clear. He dismissed as “premature” reports by Pakistan’s Geo News channel that quoted a senior aviation official as saying the plane possibly experienced engine problems.

The PIA plane had departed from Chitral, a city famous for tourist resorts and rugged mountain peaks near the Afghan border, and was more than halfway through the flight to Islamabad when it lost contact with ground controllers.

A villager, identified as Tehseen by Pakistani TV, said local residents were the first to reach the crash site and tried to put out the flames with mud. It took hours for rescue teams to arrive at the wreckage.

“It is a very difficult terrain where the plane crashed,” Muhammad Naeem Khan, a senior security official, told The Washington Post.

PIA spokesman Daniyal Gilani said the flight had 42 passengers – including two infants – as well as five crew members and one ground engineer. Earlier, PIA said “about 40 people” were aboard the ATR-42, a twin-turboprop build by a European consortium.

Among those on the flight was a renowned Pakistani singer-turned-Muslim preacher, Junaid Jamshed, who was accompanied by his wife. Jamshed gained fame with a string of rock hits in the 1980s before joining an ultraconservative Islamic group 15 years ago.

A statement by Pakistan’s armed forces said soldiers and helicopters joined the recovery efforts near the town of Hawalian in the Abbottabad district. Abbottabad was the hideaway of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed in 2011 in a U.S. commando raid on his compound.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, offered condolences for “the families who lost their dear ones,” but he gave no details on a possible death toll.

The last major crash involving an ATR-42 model was in February 2015 when a TransAsia Airways plane, carrying 58 people, went down in Taipei, Taiwan. More than 40 people were killed.

In Pakistan’s worst air disaster, an Airblue Airbus crashed before landing in Islamabad in 2010, killing all 152 people on board.

Tributes filled social media for the former singer Jamshed, who was a frequent guest on popular Pakistani television shows and was associated with a clothing line that carried his initials JJ.

Although he embraced strict Islamic traditions, Jamshed was seen as a high-profile opponent of militant Islamists. Hard-line critics called his views too liberal. Earlier this year, he was assaulted by suspected extremists.