Three Alive after Plane Crash in Pakistan

(News Today) - More than a hundred people are feared dead after a passenger plane crashed into hills outside the Pakistani capital Islamabad.

Rescuers are battling against heavy rain in the Margalla Hills area of Islamabad to try to reach the scene of the domestic Airblue plane which had 152 people on board.

A Civil Aviation Authority official said 146 passengers were on the flight along with six crew members. The exact cause of the crash is still not known.

Guards with the forestry service said they had found some wreckage and seen at least five dead bodies.

Amir Ahmed, the city's deputy commissioner, told the ARY news channel that rescuers had found at least three people who were alive but wounded.

'This is a miracle as we had been briefed that there might not be any survivors,' Ahmed said.

Saqlain Altaf said that he was on a family outing in the hills when he saw the plane, looking unsteady in the air.

'The plane had lost balance, and then we saw it going down,' he said, adding he heard the crash.

Officials at first thought it was a small plane, but police official Mohammed Saeed said this morning that 'it seems that it is a bigger tragedy'.

Civil aviation official Pervez George said the plane was flying from Karachi to Islamabad and was trying to land during difficult weather.

Airblue is private service based in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.

'The plane was about to land at the Islamabad airport when it lost contact with the control tower, and later we learned that the plane had crashed,' George said.

Pakistani news channels showed what appeared to be wreckage of the plane as a helicopter hovered above the heavily forested hills to assess the situation.

Fire was visible and smoke was blowing up from the scene.

The army said it was sending special troops to the area to help out along with helicopters.

Mohammed Usman, an official at the Benazir Bhutto International Airport said dozens of relatives of passengers gathered there were crying and desperate to get information about their loved ones.

Airblue could not immediately be reached for comment.

The only previous recorded accident for Airblue, a carrier founded in 2003, was a tailstrike in May 2008 at Quetta airport by one of the airline's Airbus 321 jets.

There were no casualties and damage was minimal, according to the U.S.-based Aviation Safety Network.

Airblue flies within Pakistan as well as internationally to the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the United Kingdom.

Other Pakistani airlines have come under international scrutiny due to safety concerns.

In 2007, the European Union temporarily banned flights in its airspace of most of the aircraft operated by Pakistan's national carrier, Pakistan International Airlines, because of concerns over the age of the aircraft and poor maintenance.

The bloc lifted the ban later that year after the airline took action to comply with safety standards.

The last major plane crash in Pakistan was in July 2006 when a Fokker F-27 twin-engine aircraft operated by Pakistan International Airlines slammed into a wheat field on the outskirts of the central Pakistani city of Multan, killing all 45 people on board.

In August 1989, another PIA Fokker, with 54 people onboard, went down in northern Pakistan on a domestic flight. The plane's wreckage was never found.

In September 1992, a PIA Airbus A300 crashed into a mountain in Nepal, killing all 167 people on board. Investigators found the plane was flying 1,500 feet lower than it reported as it approached the Katmandu airport.

Source : kompas

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