Plane crashes in Afghanistan with 43 on board: Afghan ministry

An Afghan commercial passenger plane with 43 people on board, including six foreigners, crashed into the mountains of northern Afghanistan due to bad weather today, officials said.

The Pamir Airways plane was en route from the northern province of Kunduz to Kabul when it came down over the Hindu Kush mountains. It was not immediately clear whether there were any survivors.

The government said the aircraft lost radio contact about 30 kilometres from the capital. It was carrying 38 passengers and five crew, interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary told AFP.

"I can confirm that a Pamir Airways plane has crashed over the Salang mountains with 38 passengers and five crew members on board," Bashary said.

"There were some foreigners among the passengers," he added. According to a passenger list obtained by AFP from the Pamir Airways office in Kunduz, six foreigners, including a woman, boarded the plane. There were 35 men and three women, according to the name list.

The Afghan government has dispatched a team to the rugged mountains to find the wreckage and search for survivors, the interior ministry said, appealing to the US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban to assist in the rescue effort.

"We ask our ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) colleagues to help us locate the site of the crash using their unmanned planes," Bashary said.

NATO in Kabul said they had a fixed-wing reconnaissance plane already trying to locate the site of the crash and helicopters on standby in Kabul in case any
survivors were found.

The Afghan defence ministry said they could provide helicopters for search and rescue if requested by the airline and relevant ministries, spokesman General Mohammad Zair Azimi told AFP.

The cause of crash was bad weather and the Afghan transport ministry was coordinating the search and rescue mission, Yalda Natiq, its director of communications, told AFP.

The transport minister had left to personally oversee the search and rescue evacuation mission, Bashary said.

According to its website, Pamir Airways was founded in May 1995 and is the oldest private airline in Afghanistan.

It says it operates flights with two newly purchased Boeing 737s, which are the most recently registered aircraft in Afghanistan.