Pakistan yesterday mourned the 47 victims of its deadliest plane crash in four years, among them a famed rockstar-turned-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.
The ATR-42 aircraft involved in the crash had undergone regular maintenance, including an “A-check” certification in October, airline chairman Muhammad Azam Saigol said.
Photo: Reuters
“I want to make it clear that it was a perfectly sound aircraft,” Saigol said.
The aircraft appeared to have suffered a failure in one of its two turboprop engines just before the crash, he added, but this would have to be confirmed by an investigation.
“I think there was no technical error or human error,” Saigol told a news conference late on Wednesday. “Obviously, there will be a proper investigation.”
Television images appeared to show rescue officials retrieving the aircraft’s “black box” flight recorder from the wreckage, and the airline confirmed the recovery to the Geo News channel.
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.
Worried relatives of the dead gathered in stunned silence at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad, some weeping quietly, others besieging officials with questions.
“What can I tell you?” Raja Amir said as he waited for his mother’s remains. “I don’t know what we will get of her. There is still another hell to go through.”
Remains were being taken by helicopter to Islamabad, where DNA tests would be used to identify them, authorities said.
Much of the public’s 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 traveling evangelist with the conservative Tableeghi Jamaat group.
Many comments on Twitter pointed at the contrast between his two roles, first as a heartthrob pop sensation singing about love and heartbreak, and then as a stern, bearded preacher admonishing young people 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.
Among the 46 others who perished were two infants, three foreigners and five crew listed on the passenger manifest.
Two Austrians and a Chinese man were the foreigners, the airline said.
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