KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An Afghan passenger jet with 104 people on board disappeared from radar during a snowstorm, and authorities on Friday launched a search and rescue operation. Most passengers were thought to be Afghans, but at least three Americans were also believed to have been on board.
The Kam Air Boeing 737 took off Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat bound for the capital but was unable to land because of a snowstorm, Feda Mohammed Fedayi, the airline's deputy director, told The Associated Press.
"The last time that we have been told that the aircraft was seen on radar was about 3.1 miles east of Kabul," Transport Minister Enayatullah Qasemi said at a news conference. "Since this morning we have begun a search and rescue operation in the area."
Fedayi said the plane was diverted to an airport in Pakistan, possibly the border city of Peshawar, but that as of Friday morning the company had no word on whether it landed safely. Pakistani aviation officials told AP the plane never entered their airspace.
The area between Kabul and the Pakistan border is dominated by high mountains, making the flight hazardous in bad weather and any rescue attempt difficult and dangerous. The area is so remote that officials suspect militants, including Osama bin Laden, have hidden there since the fall of Afghanistan's former Taliban government in 2001.
The company's flights are popular with Afghans wealthy enough to avoid long journeys over bumpy roads. Aid and reconstruction workers also use them, and three of the passengers were believed to be Americans working for Management Sciences for Health, a firm based in Cambridge, Mass, said company representative William Schiffbauer.
Schiffbauer, who's based in Kabul, said the three employees were women. He declined to give further details.
Beth Lee, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, said officials were trying to establish just how many Americans were on the plane.
Fedayi said the crew was from Kyrgyzstan, and that the pilot held a Canadian passport, but had no further details of who was on board.
Fedayi, who went to Kabul airport along with worried government officials on Friday morning, said Kam Air had had no contact with the plane, which was carrying 96 passengers and eight crew members, since about 3 p.m. on Thursday.
He said the plane had radioed the main U.S. military base at Bagram, north of Kabul, during the flight to check on the weather, but didn't ask the American controllers for permission to land.
In Pakistan, Abid Rao, the deputy chief of Civil Aviation said authorities said no plane has entered Pakistani territory or contacted its air traffic controllers. "We have checked all of our stations."
The manager of Peshawar airport, Syed Zahoor Ali Shah, also said his staff had no word of the plane.
Officials in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, which lies on the route toward Peshawar, said the plane hadn't landed there.
Maj. Mark McCann, a spokesman for the U.S. military, was unable to confirm whether the plane had crashed, but said American and NATO officials were meeting with government and airline representatives to discuss its fate and whether to launch a search operation.
The last major plane crash in Afghanistan was on Nov. 27 last year, when a transport plane under contract to the U.S. military crashed in central Bamiyan province, killing three American soldiers and three American civilian crew.
The most recent commercial crash was on March 19, 1998, when an Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 slammed into a mountain near Kabul, killing all 45 passengers and crew.
Kam Air was the first private airline established in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and made its maiden flight on the Kabul-Herat route in November 2003. The airline operates a fleet of leased Boeing and Antonov aircraft on domestic Afghan routes as well as to Dubai.
Kabul was hit by heavy snow on Thursday. All outbound flights were canceled, though the clouds had cleared by midday on Friday.
