Five children, 29 women, honeymoon couple among passengers
ISLAMABAD, JULY 28
All 155 people aboard a Pakistani passenger plane were killed today when the ill-fated aircraft crashed into the Margalla Hills overlooking Islamabad in heavy rain amid poor visibility and turned into a ball of flames in the country’s worst air disaster in recent times.
The Airbus A321 operated by private airline Airblue —which had 147 passengers and eight crew aboard — hit the Margalla Hills near Daman-e-Koh viewpoint at about 10 am local time and exploded into pieces.
“It saddens me to announce that (while) some intact bodies were showing signs of life, nobody has survived,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said.
Bodies were mostly mutilated and in pieces, he said, adding they could not be identified immediately.
Malik said he had asked the Federal Investigation Agency to ascertain the details of all passengers and to look into the possibility whether the crash may have been caused by an act of sabotage or terrorism.
Earlier, Malik and Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira had said that rescuers had found some survivors.
Two Americans, five members of the same family and a newly married couple coming to Islamabad for their honeymoon were among passengers of the aircraft, which took off from Karachi at 7.50 am.
Five children and 29 women were also on the aircraft.
The plane was about to land at Islamabad’s Benazir Bhutto International Airport when it lost radio contact with the control tower and later crashed into the thickly-forested hills overlooking the capital city, officials said.
The wreckage fell into a deep ravine between two hills.
Several hours after the crash, rescue workers and military personnel pulled out the bodies from the smoldering and burning wreckage that lay scattered over a thickly forested area in inaccessible hills shrouded by clouds and fog.
Officials said they believed the crash was caused by bad weather. However, the exact cause would be ascertained by an inquiry to be conducted by the Civil Aviation Authority, they said.
Officials and rescue workers said they were unable to find even a single body that was fully intact.
‘We’ve completed 98 per cent of the rescue operations and no bodies have been recovered intact…We found heads, limbs and even fingers,” said Deputy Inspector General of Police Bin Yamin.
The body parts were placed in bags that were tied with rope and removed from the crash site.
Rescue workers said they had shouted out for possible survivors but received no response.
Army helicopters flew dozens of sorties to transport bags with body parts to a nearby helipad, from where they were brought by ambulances to different hospitals in Islamabad.
Interior Minister Malik said there were 147 passengers and eight crew members on board the aircraft.
A total of 159 people were booked on the flight from Karachi to Islamabad but a dozen of them did not show up, he said.
Airblue official Raheel Ahmed told reporters in Karachi that the aircraft’s pilot, Pervez Iqbal Chaudhry, had 35 years of experience and had logged over 25,000 flying hours.
The Airbus A321 was 10 years old and had been used by Airblue for the past four years, he said.
“It would not be correct to speculate about the cause of the crash. The aircraft was fully serviceable and there were no technical faults in it. The weather, no doubt, was bad but it was not below the parameters. The investigation by the Civil Aviation Authority will establish the facts,” Ahmed said.
Islamabad has been hit by heavy monsoon rains for the past three days and the city was covered by fog and low-lying clouds.
Local TV channels showed twisted metal parts hanging from trees and scattered across the ground.
The crash occurred in an area that is not easily accessible as the Margalla Hills are covered by thick forests.
Malik said the aircraft was at 2,600 feet when it was cleared to land. It then rose up to 3,000 feet for “unexplained”reasons before disappearing from radar screens, he said.
“The (control) tower did not receive any SOS message or report of a technical problem before the crash,” Malik said.
Sources in the Civil Aviation Authority expressed surprise at authorities clearing the aircraft to land at Islamabad despite the poor visibility and bad weather.
The sources told PTI that State-run Pakistan International Airlines had diverted all its flights to Islamabad to Lahore.
Scores of anxious relatives of passengers gathered at the Benazir Bhutto International Airport and different hospitals in Islamabad to get information about their kin. Many broke down and wept inconsolably.
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani expressed shock and grief at the crash.
The government declared a day of national mourning and Gilani put off a meeting of his cabinet till next week.
The premier also surveyed rescue operations from the air.
Airbus said in a statement that the aircraft which crashed was 10 years old and leased to Airblue in 2006. It had made about 13,500 flights.
City residents said they had seen the aircraft flying “very low” over Islamabad shortly before the crash.
“I heard a loud bang and then saw smoke rising over the Margalla Hills,” said Aman Ali, a schoolboy.
Rescuers had to trek uphill for over an hour to reach the site, where they dug through the debris with bare hands to pull out body parts.
Witnesses said most of the bodies were difficult to identify as they were mutilated and burnt.
Flames and smoke continued to spew from the wreckage several hours later though some of the fires were extinguished by the rain.
The ill-fated aircraft had taken off from Karachi at 7.50 am and was scheduled to land in Islamabad after two hours.
Today’s crash was the worst aviation accident on Pakistani soil though PIA jets had crashed in Jeddah in 1979 and Kathmandu in 1992, killing 156 and 167 people, respectively.
The last major fatal crash in Pakistan occurred in the central city of Multan in July 2006, when a PIA Fokker F27 crashed, killing 45 people.
