Wreckage of missing Afghan plane found says source

KABUL - The wreckage of an Afghan airliner that went missing with 104 people on board has been found near the capital, Kabul, a day after it was turned away because of heavy snow, a Western security source said.

The Kam Air Boeing 737 was found to the northeast of the capital, but the security source did not say if there were any survivors.

NATO troops and helicopters have been searching for the plane, which was on a flight from the western city of Herat to Kabul Thursday when it went missing after being turned away from Kabul airport.

At least seven of the 96 passengers were foreigners and six of the eight crew members were from Kyrgyzstan, Kam Air deputy director Feda Mohammed Fedayi said.

The foreigners included three American women working for a Massachusetts-based company, Management Sciences for Health, its Kabul representative William Schiffbauer said.

"We don't know if there were any survivors," the security source said, adding that the passengers included five international aid workers and nine Turkish nationals.

Deputy Interior Minister Shah Mahmoud Miakhel told Reuters earlier the plane may not have had sufficient fuel to enable it to fly as far as an airport in Pakistan.

"It did not have so much fuel to enable it to fly far," he said.

Kam Air financial controller Zimarai Kamgar said the aircraft had contacted Peshawar airport in northwestern Pakistan about an hour after it was turned away from Kabul at about 4 pm Thursday.

"It was given clearance to land, but it never arrived," Kamgar told Reuters.

Pakistani aviation officials said the plane had never made contact.

Kam Air opened as Afghanistan's only private airline in November 2003. It flies leased aircraft between Kabul and Dubai and Istanbul and operates several domestic routes. In September, an Antonov-24 operated by the airline went off the runway while landing in Kabul, slightly injuring some of the 27 passengers aboard, apparently after engine trouble.

In early 1998, 51 people died when an Antonov transport plane operated by state-run Ariana Afghan Airlines crashed in mountains near the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta after failing to land in Afghanistan because of bad weather.

In March that year, 45 people were killed when another Ariana plane, a Boeing 727, slammed into a mountain near Kabul.

In the most recent air crash in Afghanistan, three US military personnel and three civilian crew were killed when a US transport aircraft crashed in central mountains in November.

- REUTERS