A passenger jet with 42 people on board has crashed, shortly after losing contact with ground control. The Pakistan International Airlines ATR-42 aircraft vanished after taking off from the Northern Chitral region, the airline has stated.
The national carrier confirmed in a statement that Flight PK-661, from the city of Chitral to Islamabad, had lost contact with air traffic controllers.
Daily Mail reports
Airline spokesman Danyal Gilani said 37 of those on board were passengers.
The aircraft was carrying ‘around 40 people’, the airline said in a statement, but the civil aviation authority said 47 people were on board.
It is not yet clear how many casualties there were. The airline said it has mobilised its emergency response centre.
Laiq Shah, a senior police official in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said the plane crashed in the province’s Havelian area.
‘Rescue teams are reaching the scene of the crash, and then we will know more,’ Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Pervez George told Reuters.
Geo News, citing civil aviation sources, said the plane lost contact with civil aviation authority at around 4.30pm local time.
A regional police official has said the plane has crashed, Reuters reports.
Laiq Shah, a senior police official in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province told Reuters by telephone that the plane had crashed in that region, near the town of Havelian.
He said rescue personnel were en route to the scene.
The crash happened near Havelian in the north of Pakistan as the Islamabad-bound plane lost contact with ground control
A local police official, Khursheed Tanoli, told state-run Pakistan Television that the plane went down in a village in the northwest and that rescuers are trying to reach the site of the crash, AP reports.
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