A Pakistani military plane crashed into a mountainside in dense fog in a remote region of northwestern Pakistan today, killing all 17 people on board, including the chief of the air force.
The Fokker-27 turboprop lost contact with the control tower at the Kohat Air Base shortly before it was to land there, Pakistani officials said.
"This was an accident," Air Commodore Sarfraz Ahmad told reporters in the Islamabad, ruling out the possibility that the plane had been shot down on the edge of Pakistan's lawless tribal region. He said a board of inquiry will determine what caused the accident.
The crash killed air force chief Mushaf Ali Mir, 57, who was traveling from Islamabad to Kohat to conduct an annual inspection of the air base. He was accompanied by his wife, seven other air force officials and eight crew members when the plane went down about 16 miles from the base, Ahmad said.
"This is a national tragedy," Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali said, according to the Information Ministry.
Investigators were already at the site of the crash, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad. Kohat, a town of 100,000 people ringed by mountains, is less than 50 miles from the border with Afghanistan.
A large piece of the plane's tail hugged the side of a 3,000-foot mountain. Strewn across the slope were other pieces of the aircraft, witnesses said.
AP