Pakistan mourns 47 killed in plane crash
DNA tests to identify victims from remains
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan yesterday mourned the 47 victims of its deadliest plane crash in four years, among them a famed-rockstarturned-Muslim evangelist, two infants and three foreigners, as officials sought to pinpoint the cause of the disaster.
Engine trouble was initially believed responsible, but many questions remain, stirring new worries about the safety record of money-losing state carrier Pakistani International Airlines (PIA).
The pilot of the ATR-42 turboprop aircraft contacted ground authorities after one engine failed and issued a Mayday call at 4.14pm, Muhammad Azam Saigol, the airline’s chairman, told a news conference in Islamabad.
It began descending a minute later before disappearing from radar at 4.16pm.
“This plane was technically sound and was checked in October,” he said, adding the captain had flown more than 12,000 hours and the aircraft was nine years old. “Our focus now is to retrieve all the dead bodies.”
The aircraft appeared to have suffered a failure in one of its two turboprop engines just before the crash, he said, but this would have to be confirmed by an investigation.
“I think there was no technical error or human error,” he said. “Obviously there will be a proper investigation.”
PIA spokesman Danyal Gilani said the aircraft’s black box has been recovered but “it will take time to ascertain a reason of the crash”.
Outpourings of grief erupted online soon after flight PK661 smashed into the side of a mountain near the town of Havelian, in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, late on Wednesday afternoon, after taking off from the mountain resort of Chitral.
It crashed just 50km short of its destination, the international airport in Islamabad, the capital.
Much of the anguish focused on Junaid Jamshed, the vocalist of Vital Signs, one of Pakistan’s first and most successful rock and pop bands of the 1990s, who abandoned his musical career in 2001 to become a travelling evangelist with the conservative Tableeghi Jamaat group.
Many of the reactions on social network Twitter spoke to this apparent dichotomy between his two lives, first as a hearthrob pop sensation singing about love and heartbreak and later as a stern, bearded preacher admonishing youth for straying from Islam.
“Junaid Jamshed’s journey was so quintessentially Pakistani. Conflicted, passionate, devoted, ubersmart and so, so talented. Tragic loss,” Mosharraf Zaidi, an Islamabad-based development professional and analyst, said in a tweet.
Others simply shared his band’s many chart-topping hits, such as Dil Dil Pakistan, which has become an unofficial anthem, played at public gatherings since its release in 1987.
Others urged more attention for the other victims. “Dear TV channels covering the crash of PK 661: You do know that Junaid Jamshed isn’t the only one who was travelling on PK 661,” tweeted Anwar Maqsood, a Pakistani television and theatre figure.
Two infants, three foreigners and five crew were among the passengers, the flight manifest showed.
The foreigners included two Austrians and a Chinese man, the airline said. Foreign tourists increasingly flock to Chitral every year, besides thousands of domestic visitors, as Pakistan emerges from years of violence caused by a Taliban insurgency.
A member of Chitral’s traditional royal family, his wife and family were among the dead, besides a Chitral administration official, Osama Ahmad Warraich, whose wife and infant daughter also died, the Dawn newspaper said yesterday.
The aircraft, made by French company ATR in 2007, had racked up 18,739 flight hours since joining PIA’s fleet that year.
DNA testing will be used to identify the charred victims. “The dead bodies will be taken to Islamabad in helicopters ... for DNA testing and identification,” Muhammad Abbas, a hospital official at Ayub Medical Complex in the northern garrison town of Abbottabad, said. “Not one body was intact.”
Rescuers, including hundreds of villagers, had overnight pulled charred and smoking remains from the wreckage of the aircraft, parts of which were found hundreds of metres away from the main site in Abbottabad district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
A reporter at the site near the village of Saddha Batolni said part of the plane remained on fire more than five hours after the crash. “The bodies were burnt so badly we could not recognise whether they were women or men,” a villager in his thirties, who declined to give his name, said. “We put into sacks whatever we could find ... and carried them down to the ambulance.”
Six of the victims had already been identified through fingerprints, according to Ali Baz, another official at the Ayub Medical Complex.
Concerns are growing over air safety in Pakistan as media in recent years have reported near-misses following overshot runways, engines catching fire and landing gear deployment failures. In the worst such disaster, in 2010, all 152 people on board were killed when a passenger plane operated by airline Air Blue crashed in heavy rain near Islamabad.