Pakistan on Thursday mourned the 48 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.
“I want to make it clear that it was a perfectly sound aircraft,” Saigol said, ruling out the technical or human error.
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 told a news conference late on Wednesday. “Obviously there will be a proper investigation.”
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 50 km (31 miles) 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 Tableeghi Jamaat group.
“Junaid Jamshed’s journey was so quintessentially Pakistani. Conflicted, passionate, devoted, uber smart, 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.
Read more: PIA crashes left 327 people dead since 1986
-FOREIGNERS AMONG THE DEAD-
Two infants, three foreigners and five crew were among the passengers on the doomed flight, the 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 an infant daughter also died, the Dawn newspaper said on Thursday.
-SAFETY CONCERNS-
The aircraft, made by French company ATR in 2007, had racked up 18,739 flight hours since joining PIA’s fleet that year.
Its captain, Saleh Janjua, had logged more than 12,000 flight hours over his career, the airline said.
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.
Two years later, all 127 aboard were killed when a plane operated by Bhoja Air crashed near Islamabad.
Read more: Austrian, Chinese victims of PIA crash worked on hydropower project for Andritz group
Your comment…may their soul rest in peace
Its always the Army everywhere. Rest of Govt Agencies including this Godroesaken PIA needs Army to carry the dead caused by this most corrupted Government. PIA has a huge number of people who were inducted by Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif to get votes! Now in adversity all those illegally inducted manpower did not wish to carry their burden. Then there is a,stream of security forces like ASF etc. They too seem allergic to carry those who lost their lives due to a highly corrupt and incompetent executive body headed by Azam Sehgal. PIA was a dream Airline destroyed by a greedy business man who wanted to oblige another corrupt businessman.
Comments are closed.