Relatives desperate to find the bodies of their loved ones yesterday joined emergency teams battling thick mud, rain and slippery hillsides at the scene of Pakistan’s worst-ever plane crash.
Authorities speculated that monsoon weather the day before may have been a factor in the crash of the Airblue flight into hills overlooking the capital, Islamabad. The plane was apparently off course when it slammed into the ground, killing all 152 people on board.
Army troops and civilian rescue workers searched a large stretch of the hills scorched by the crash, but tough conditions slowed the pace of operations, said Ramzan Khalid, spokesman for the Capital Development Authority, which helps deal with emergencies.
PHOTO: AFP
Helicopters could not fly in the heavy rain, he said.
An Associated Press Television News cameraman in the hills saw relatives of passengers working with soldiers and other rescuers at one crash site, where the undercarriage of the jet had come to rest.
They had collected several body parts in small bags.
Dozens of relatives and friends of those killed slept outside Islamabad’s largest hospital overnight, hoping to receive bodies.
They were still there yesterday morning, hugging one another as their tears mixed with the heavy rain, but few corpses were released.
Anguished relatives lashed out at authorities yesterday, devastated to discover that the laborious process of identifying the remains of their loved ones could take up to a week.
Family members sat sobbing at an Islamabad community center, as they gave blood samples so that authorities can match DNA against the charred remains of victims lying in an industrial-sized cold storage in Islamabad.
“What will the poor people, especially those who came from other cities like Karachi, do for one week?” said Touheed Alvi, who lost his brother, Farid Alvi, in the crash.
Farid had been flying home after visiting his elder brother Touheed, a professor at DJ Science College in Karachi.
The government set up a DNA sample collection point at the community center, where emotional relatives swapped memories of their loved ones and sought solace over Wednesday’s tragedy as the “will of God the almighty.”
The plane’s “black box” flight data recorders have yet to be recovered. Information extracted from them will be key in determining the cause of the crash. Pakistani Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar and other officials have said the government does not suspect terrorism.
The plane was flying from Karachi, the country’s commercial capital.
Even when the search is completed, it could take days to identify all the victims with DNA testing since most of the bodies were torn apart and burned in the crash, a grim scene described by rescue workers scouring the twisted metal wreckage.
“There is nothing left, just piles and bundles of flesh. There are just some belongings, like two or three traveling bags, some checkbooks, and I saw a picture of a young boy. Otherwise everything is burned,” rescue worker Murtaza Khan said.
The crash was the latest tragedy to jolt a country that has seen thousands of deaths in recent years from al-Qaeda and Taliban attacks.
The US embassy said at least two US citizens were on the plane, an Airbus A321, which was carrying 146 passengers and six crew members.
In the US, Paulette Kirksey said that her godmother, Rosie Ahmed of Gadsden, Alabama, and her husband, Saleem Ahmed, were among those on the plane. Rosie Ahmed was in Pakistan to arrange for her husband to move to the US, Kirksey said. She said Rosie Ahmed was in her late 50s.
The Pakistani government declared yesterday a day of mourning for those lost in the crash.
As of Wednesday night, when rescue work was suspended till the morning, 115 bodies had been recovered, federal Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira said.
The control tower at Islamabad airport lost contact with the plane as it was trying to land on Wednesday morning, said Pervez George, a civil aviation official.
Several officials noted the plane seemed to be an unusual distance from the airport, which was about 15km away.
Raheel Ahmed, a spokesman for the airline, said the plane had no known technical issues, and the pilots did not send any emergency signals. Airbus said it would provide technical assistance to the crash investigators.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the