A total of 127 people were killed when a Boeing 737-200 of Bhoja Air crashed a short distance from the international airport in the Pakistani garrison city of Rawalpindi, the second such accident in less than two years.
Bhoja Air’s flight B4-213 from Karachi to Islamabad lost contact with air traffic control shortly after 6.30 pm yesterday as it was coming in to land at the Benazir Bhutto International Airport, which serves both Islamabad and Rawalpindi, amid bad weather.
The plane slammed into the ground at Hussainabad village, located less than 10 km from the airport.
Debris was scattered over an area of over one kilometre and parts of the aircraft fell on some houses in the village though there were no reports of casualties on the ground.
All 121 passengers, including 11 children and infants, and six crew members were killed instantly, officials said.
Mohammad Asif Majeed, Director of the Disaster Management Directorate, confirmed there were no survivors. He said the airliner had crashed on a “cluth of houses in a village’’.
Islamabad and Rawalpindi had experienced bad weather, including rain and lightning, at the time of the accident, and several witnesses told TV news channels that they had seen the aircraft burst into flames after being hit by lightning shortly before it crashed.
However, there was no official confirmation of reports of a lightning strike.
Capt Arshad Mehmood, a Pakistan Navy pilot who lives near the site of the crash, told reporters that he had seen the aircraft stall and descend rapidly before it hit the ground.