All 48 people on board a PIA plane, including popular pop singer-turned-Islamic preacher Junaid Jamshed and two foreigners, were feared dead on Wednesday as their Islamabad-bound flight crashed in a hilly area near Pakistan’s garrison town of Abbottabad.
The Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane PK-661 with 48 people, including Jamshed, his wife and Deputy Commissioner Chitral Osama Warraich, on board crashed in Patola village near Pakistan Ordinance Factory, Havelian, while en route to Islamabad from Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
The national carrier’s flight departed from Chitral around 3:30 pm and was expected to land at Islamabad’s Benazir Bhutto International Airport at around 4:40 pm. A PIA spokesman confirmed that the pilot of the ill-fated plane had given a ‘mayday’ distress call to traffic control before it went off the radar. “The ATR aircraft flight had 42 passengers, including nine women and two infants, along with two air hostesses and three pilots,” he said. Of those on board, at least two were foreigners.
“The debris of the plane has been found. So far there is no indication of anyone’s survival,” an official said.
Though officially there was no information on the cause of the crash, Aviation Herald, that reports daily about incidents and critical situations in civil aviation, said the plane had “engine problems”. The daily citing local government sources said chances to find survivors are “bleak”.