80 feared dead in air crash

An Afghan transport plane carrying at least 51 people crashed in border mountains in southwestern Pakistan yesterday, night and there was little hope of survivors, Pakistani and Afghan officials said.

Pakistani officials said the plane crashed in the Khojak Pass area with about 80 people aboard after diverting to Pakistan during a domestic flight because rain and snowstorms prevented it from landing inside Afghanistan.

But a Pakistan-based Afghan news service quoted the deputy foreign minister of Afghanistan's Taliban Islamic Movement government, Mullah Abdul Jalil, as saying there were 51 civilians on board. "There is no hope of any survivors." the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted Jalil as saying.

Pakistani and Taliban officials said rescue parties had been sent to the area and it would take hours to get any information from them because of the difficult terrain and bad weather in the area.

An official of Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) force, Colonel Mujtaba, told Reuters that his men at a border post had seen flames rising from the crash site.

He said the plane had flown from the southern town of Kandahar to Herat in the west, but failed to land there because of bad weather. It then tried to land at Shindand, south of there, but again failed and then headed back to Kandahar, where bad weather also prevented the landing.

AIP quoted Taliban officials as saying that after failing to land at Kandahar, the plane headed towards Quetta, capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan province, and crashed possibly because it had used up all its fuel.