Snow hampers search for missing Afghan jet
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-02-05 17:54

Fresh snow from heavy clouds fell on Kabul Saturday, complicating the task for search teams scouring the mountainous region for a passenger jet carrying 104 people, including about 21 foreigners, that disappeared from radar during a snowstorm two days ago.

Relatives and officials expressed doubts that any of the missing would be found alive. The flight could turn out to be the war-ravaged country’s deadliest aviation disaster.

Three passengers were believed to be American.

With snow clouds covering Kabul again on Saturday, it was unclear if aircraft would be able to resume searching.

“The weather is no good, so I don’t think the air search can resume,” said Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi.

However, the commander of the main corps of Afghanistan’s new national army said 500 of his men resumed the search at first light.

“May God help us find them today,” Maj. Gen. Mohammed Moeen Faqir said. “We are doing what we can.”

Plane disappeared from radar

The Kam Air Boeing 737-200 took off Thursday from the western city of Herat bound for Kabul, but was unable to land because of poor visibility. The airline initially said the plane was diverted to neighboring Pakistan, but officials there said it never reached their airspace.

Transport Minister Enayatullah Qasemi said the pilot last contacted the Kabul control tower about 3 p.m. Thursday to ask for a weather update. Bagram Air Base, the U.S. military base north of Kabul with overall responsibility for Afghan airspace, cleared the plane for landing, but moments later it disappeared from radar screens.

Afghanistan’s NATO peacekeeping force sent helicopters and ground teams to scour an area southeast of the city, where officials said the plane was last seen Thursday. But they returned to base empty-handed Friday amid freezing fog.

In an illustration of the possible difficulties facing the search operation, a commercial flight that went missing in 1989 in the mountains of neighboring Pakistan has never been found.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry official in Ankara, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Turkish military officers in Kabul reported wreckage had been found southeast of Kabul. The country’s air force is in charge of the Kabul airport as part of the NATO peacekeeping mission.

But NATO and Afghan officials denied the report. French Lt. Col. Patrick Poulain, a spokesman at NATO headquarters in Kabul, said helicopters had failed to even pick up a signal from the aircraft’s rescue beacon.

He held out little hope that anyone would be found alive Saturday.

“With the snow storm of last night, it would not be easy to survive,” he said.

Perilous terrain

Kabul is surrounded by towering, frigid peaks, a hazard that usually forces commercial aircraft to be grounded during bad weather. Veterans of the battle-scarred airport describe hair-raising approaches and close calls, and the area near the Pakistani border is so remote that officials suspect militants, including Osama bin Laden, have hidden there since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

When clouds lifted for several hours Friday, hundreds of Afghan troops were sent to Khaki Jabar, a district with few roads and steep ridges rising to more than 13,000 feet.

Kam Air was the first private airline established in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and made its maiden flight on the Kabul-Herat route in November 2003.

Its mainly domestic flights using leased Boeing and Antonov planes are popular with aid and reconstruction workers, as well as those wealthy enough to avoid long journeys over bumpy roads. However, there have been safety concerns about Kam Air’s flights, and U.N. staff are banned from taking them.

The airline said the Boeing was carrying 96 passengers and six Russian and two Afghan crew members.

Three of those on board were believed to be American women working for Management Sciences for Health, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., said William Schiffbauer, a company representative in Kabul.

Turkey’s government said that nine Turks were aboard. The Italian Defense Ministry said one passenger was Italian.

The last major plane crash in Afghanistan was on Nov. 27, when a transport plane under contract to the U.S. military crashed in central Bamiyan province, killing three American soldiers and three American civilian crew.

The most recent commercial crash was on March 19, 1998, when an Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 slammed into a mountain near the area being searched Friday, killing all 45 passengers and crew.

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