Up to 130 people are feared dead after a Boeing 737 crashed while trying to land in bad weather near the Pakistani capital Islamabad on Friday, officials said.
The Bhoja airline flight from Karachi came down outside Islamabad’s international airport, police official Fazle Akbar said, adding that emergency teams have been sent to the site.
“There is no chance of any survivors. It will be only a miracle. The plane is totally destroyed,” he told AFP from the crash site.
There were conflicting reports about how many people were on board the plane.
A senior defence ministry official said initial reports suggested there were 126 people on board, Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority said it was carrying 121 passengers and nine crew, while the chief of Islamabad police Bani Amin told AFP from the crash site that 127 were on board.
Asked if there were any survivors, the defence ministry official said: “So far there is no good news.”
Saifur Rehman, an official from the police rescue team said the plane came down in Hussain Abad village, about three kilometres (two miles) from the main Islamabad highway.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan barred the head of an airline whose jet crashed near Islamabad from leaving the country on Saturday as it began an investigation into the disaster that sparked anger among distraught relatives.
The Bhoja Air flight from Karachi came down in fields near a village on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital on Friday evening, killing all 127 people onboard, in the city’s second major fatal air crash in less than two years.
Interior minister Rehman Malik said a committee had been set up to investigate the crash and the head of the airline Farooq Bhoja had been put on an “exit control list”, meaning he is banned from leaving Pakistan.
Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) officials said the second-hand Boeing 737-200 was nearly 30 years old, but an airline spokeswoman said the plane’s age had no bearing on the tragedy, which happened as a thunderstorm hit the city.
“The aircraft was old and second-hand but it is not something unusual. The fleet of state-run Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) also runs old aircraft,” Bhoja Air official Masham Zafar told AFP.
“There was no technical issue and bad weather is to be blamed.”
She said the plane left Karachi with CAA approval and was given clearance to land at Islamabad.
CAA director general Nadeem Khan Yusufzai said the plane suddenly dropped from 2,900 feet to 2,000 feet as it made its final approach to land, and vanished from the airport radar.
He said another plane from the private Airblue airline landed safely from the same approach about 10 minutes afterwards and there was no indication from the Bhoja pilot that he was in distress.
The flight data recorder has been recovered and will be sent abroad for analysis, he said, and the overall investigation could take up to a year to complete its work.
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