Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) confirmed the disappearance of a charter flight in northern Afghanistan, with six people on board, following Afghan authorities reported the crash of a plane
According to Russian authorities, it is a Falcon 10 plane, owned by the company Athletic Group LLC and a private individual, which carried six people on board, including four crew members and two passengers.
The device was carrying out a charter ambulance flight on a route from Gaya, India, to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and then to Zhukovsky airport, in Moscow, according to a statement released by the Interfax news agency.
The plane “stopped communicating and disappeared from radar screens,” Russian authorities said.
According to a source from the Russian Emergency Services, cited by the official Russian news agency TASS, “the cause of the accident, according to preliminary data, was the failure of both engines”.
The accident occurred on Saturday night in a difficult-to-access mountainous area of Badakhshan province, with Afghan authorities saying that a team was sent to the location, which is around an eight-hour drive from the provincial capital.
Although the Afghan authorities initially assumed that the crashed plane was Indian, the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation however denied, through the social network X, that one of its planes was involved in the incident.
International carriers have avoided flying over Afghanistan since the Taliban took over the country in 2021.
Those that do, traverse Afghan airspace for just a few minutes as they fly over the sparsely populated Wakhan corridor in Badakhshan province, a narrow strip between Tajikistan and Pakistan.
