A Pakistan International Airlines flight crashed on Wednesday near Abbottabad, Pakistan, officials said.
The airline said the ATR-42 aircraft was carrying 48 people – 42 passengers, five crew members and one ground engineer – when it lost contact with a control tower on its way from Chitral to Islamabad.
The army said it had dispatched troops and helicopters to the scene, but an official told Reuters there were unlikely to be any survivors. “All of the bodies are burned beyond recognition. The debris is scattered,” said Taj Muhammad Khan. Images shown on Pakistani TV channels and circulated on social media showed a trail of wreckage engulfed in flames on a mountain slope.
The military said 21 bodies had been recovered.
Pop star-turned-preacher Junaid Jamshed was among those on board Flight PK-661, his manager, Arsalan Khan, told CNN.
Jamshed soared to fame in the 1980s with Vital Signs, one of the most iconic pop bands in Pakistan.
After a successful career as a solo singer in the 1990s, Jamshed gave up pop stardom to focus on religious music, or ‘nasheeds’.
Pakistan’s last major air disaster was in 2015 when a military helicopter crashed in a remote northern valley, killing eight people including the Norwegian, Philippine and Indonesian envoys and the wives of Malaysian and Indonesian envoys.
The country’s deadliest crash was in 2010, when an Airbus 321 operated by the private airline Airblue and flying from Karachi crashed into hills outside Islamabad while about to land, killing all 152 on board.
