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Pakistan mourned the 48 victims of its deadliest plane crash in four years, among them a famed-rockstar-turned-Muslim evangelist, two infants and three foreigners, as officials sought to pinpoint the cause of the disaster.
Engine trouble was initially believed responsible, but many questions remain, stirring new worries about the safety record of money-losing state carrier Pakistani International Airlines.
The ATR-42 aircraft involved in the crash had undergone regular maintenance, including an “A-check†certification in October, airline chairman Muhammad Azam Saigol said.
“I want to make it clear that it was a perfectly sound aircraft,†Saigol said, ruling out the technical or human error.
The aircraft appeared to have suffered a failure in one of its two turboprop engines just before the crash, he said, but this would have to be confirmed by an investigation.
Outpourings of grief erupted online soon after flight PK661 smashed into the side of a mountain near the town of Havelian, in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, late on Wednesday afternoon, after taking off from the mountain resort of Chitral.
It crashed just 50 km (31 miles) short of its destination, the international airport in Islamabad, the capital.
Much of the anguish focused on Junaid Jamshed, the vocalist of Vital Signs, one of Pakistan’s first and most successful rock and pop bands of the 1990s, who abandoned his musical career in 2001 to become a travelling evangelist with the Tableeghi Jamaat group.
“Junaid Jamshed’s journey was so quintessentially Pakistani. Conflicted, passionate, devoted, uber smart, and so, so talented. Tragic loss,†Mosharraf Zaidi, an Islamabad-based development professional and analyst, said in a tweet.
Others simply shared his band’s many chart-topping hits, such as ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’, which has become an unofficial anthem, played at public gatherings since its release in 1987.Two infants, three foreigners and five crew were among the passengers on the doomed flight, the manifest showed.
The foreigners included two Austrians and a Chinese man, the airline said. Foreign tourists increasingly flock to Chitral every year, besides thousands of domestic visitors, as Pakistan emerges from years of violence caused by a Taliban insurgency.
A member of Chitral’s traditional royal family, his wife and family were among the dead, besides a Chitral administration official, Osama Ahmad Warraich, whose wife and an infant daughter also died, the Dawn newspaper said on Thursday.
Concerns are growing over air safety in Pakistan as media in recent years have reported near-misses following overshot runways, engines catching fire and landing gear deployment failures.
In the worst such disaster, in 2010, all 152 people on board were killed when a passenger plane operated by airline Air Blue crashed in heavy rain near Islamabad.
Two years later, all 127 aboard were killed when a plane operated by Bhoja Air crashed near Islamabad. The incident shows that institutions did not learn from the past incidents as no concrete steps were taken for the safety of the passengers. The government should conduct result oriented inquiry to ascertain the cause of this deadliest incident and should take steps on the basis of findings of the inquiry to avoid such untoward incidents in future. If any human fault is involved in anywhere should be taken to task and also affected families should be financially compensated.
