According to an army statement, early on Tuesday, a Pakistani military aircraft on a training flight crashed in a built-up residential area in the garrison city of Rawalpindi which killed all five crew members and 12 civilians. The Pakistan Army also said that the plane crashed in the suburbs of Mora Kalu village, killing 12 civilians and five crew members and destroying five to six houses. It further added that another 12 civilians were injured in the crash, which set off a fire.
The website of the newspaper The News carried footage which shows a building engulfed in flames. There was no immediate reply on the cause of the crash or the type of aircraft involved.
As per the statement from the army’s communications wing, military and civilian rescue teams reached the location and extinguished the fire and took the injured to hospital.
District commissioner Rawalpindi Ali Randhawa told that the incident occurred between 2:30 to 2:40 am when a small military plane which was on a training mission crashed in Rawalpindi.
The dead and injured were shifted to various hospitals of Rawalpindi, where according to the paramedics most of the victims were badly burnt.
Radio Pakistan also reported that 17 people were killed in the accident. The authorities also added that while the cause of the crash is yet to be ascertained and the rescue operation was completed by the morning.
As the plane crashed in a village which is located close to the posh area of Bahria Town and thus after the crash, a massive fire broke out that engulfed several houses in the locality.
How did the plane come down?
Witnesses at the scene said the aircraft crashed into a family home in a residential area around 02:00 local time (07:00 GMT).
“I was awake when the plane flew over my room and it was already on fire in the air,” said resident Ghulam Khan. “The sound was so scary, it was only a small plane. It then fell on a house where a family used to live.”
Some of the locals have also uploaded pictures of the burning houses on social media.
Pakistan has a poor air safety track record, with plane and helicopter crashes occurring frequently over the years. The worst aviation tragedy on Pakistani soil came in July 2010 when an Airbus 321 passenger jet operated by the private airline Airblue crashed into hills overlooking Islamabad. The flight was coming from Karachi.
Leave a Reply