ISLAMABAD // A Pakistani plane carrying 48 people, including a Pakistani pop star, crashed on Wednesday in the mountainous north of the country and burst into flames. There were no survivors.
Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight PK661 came down on a flight from the city of Chitral to Islamabad, said the civil aviation authority.
It was not clear what caused the crash, which occurred near the village of Saddha Batolni in Abbottabad district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The military, which was part of rescue operations, said 21 bodies had so far been retrieved from the wreckage.
Villagers were collecting body parts in shawls and on woven beds, he said, while police and rescue teams were searching the site with torches.
“The plane debris is scattered in the mountains and residents told me that it is completely destroyed,” said Sardar Aurangzeb Nalota, a local politician.
Among those on board was Junaid Jamshed, a former Pakistani pop star turned evangelical Muslim who was embroiled in a blasphemy row in 2014, according to the Chitral airport manager and a local police official.
The singer’s Twitter account had said he was in Chitral.
Tributes were pouring in on social media for the former lead singer of the country's first major pop band, whose popular Dil Dil Pakistan became an unofficial national anthem.
“The voice of my youth, the voice of my generation ... #JunaidJamshed you will be sorely missed,” tweeted user Huma A Shah.
The terrain around Havelian is hilly, roughly the same altitude as the Margalla Hills which overlook Islamabad.
“The plane has crashed in a far-flung village in the mountains. One has to travel for more than four kilometres on foot to reach the spot,” said a police official in Havelian Ilyas Abbasi.
“Villagers on site told us that the plane was first on fire and now smoke is rising from the wreckage.”
The airline said the plane was an ATR-42 turboprop aircraft, which lost contact en route from Chitral.
Saeed Wazir, a senior local police official, said that darkness, bad roads and difficult terrain made it difficult to reach the site.
The country's last major air disaster was in May last year, when a military helicopter crashed in a northern valley, killing eight people including the Norwegian, Philippine and Indonesian envoys and the wives of the Malaysian and Indonesian envoys.
In August the same year, another army helicopter crashed killing 12 military personnel.
The deadliest air disaster on Pakistani soil was in 2010, when an Airbus 321 operated by private airline Airblue and flying from Karachi crashed into hills outside Islamabad while about to land, killing all 152 on board. An official report blamed the accident on a confused captain and a hostile cockpit atmosphere.
But the deadliest accident involving PIA came when an Airbus A300 crashed into a cloud-covered hillside on approach to the Nepalese capital Kathmandu in 1992 after the plane descended too early, killing 167 people.
Despite this, PIA has been crash free for 10 years, and received a seven out of seven rating on the highly-cited AirlineRatings.com.
But a 2014 analysis by US statistician Nate Silver based on data from 1985 – 2014, found the airline to have a high number of what he termed “near-misses” – an indicator of risk.
Most of the carrier’s fleet apart from its latest Boeing 777s were also banned entry from the European Union between March and November 2007.
* Agence France-Presse