Four people are reported to have survived after a private jet carrying out a medical evacuation from Thailand to Russia disappeared from radar screens and crashed in a remote and mountainous area of north-eastern Afghanistan on Saturday.
Russian aviation authorities said two passengers and four crew members were onboard the charter ambulance flight, which was travelling from Utapao airport, near Pattaya, to Moscow via India and Uzbekistan.
On Sunday, rescuers reached the crash site in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province – about 150 miles (250km) north-east of the capital, Kabul – and found four survivors.
“Of the six people onboard the aircraft, tentatively, four are alive,” Russia’s federal air transport agency said on Sunday, citing the Russian embassy in Afghanistan. “They have various injuries. The fate of two people is being clarified.”
The Taliban’s transportation and civil aviation ministry issued a statement online on Sunday saying the plane and four survivors had been found in the Kuf Ab district of Badakhshan, near Aruz Koh mountain.
“The investigative team of the Islamic Emirate continues their efforts to search for and provide assistance to the remaining individuals,” the Taliban administration’s top spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in a statement.
According to the RIA news agency, the plane was carrying a Russian woman “in a serious condition” from a hospital in Pattaya to Russia.
“She was accompanied by her husband, a private entrepreneur, also a Russian citizen, who paid for the flight,” the agency added.
Several Russian media outlets said the passengers were a couple from Volgodonsk in southern Russia.
A manifest list for the plane, published by the Shot news outlet, appeared to show the crew were Russian nationals too.
Shot said the pilot of the jet – a Russian-registered, French-made Dassault Aviation Falcon 10 manufactured in 1978 – warned that fuel was running low and said the plane would try to land at an airport in Tajikistan.
The pilot of the twin-engine jet reported that one engine had stopped, followed by the second one. Twenty-five minutes after the initial call, the plane vanished from radar screens.
Tracking data from FlightRadar24, analysed by the Associated Press, showed the aircraft’s last position just south of the city of Peshawar, Pakistan, at about 1330GMT on Saturday.
The Taliban-run Afghan aviation ministry, which is investigating the incident, said in a statement on X that the plane’s planned route did not include passing through Afghanistan’s airspace and that the jet’s deviation from its planned route was “probably due to technical issues”.
Russia’s investigative committee said it had opened a criminal case to determine whether safety rules had been violated.
The plane’s reported owner, a small Russian company called Athletic Group LLC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
International carriers have largely avoided Afghanistan since the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of the country. Those that briefly fly over rush through Afghan airspace for only a few minutes while over Badakhshan province’s Wakhan corridor, a narrow panhandle that juts out of the east of the country between Tajikistan and Pakistan.
Typically, aircraft heading toward the corridor make a sharp turn north near Peshawar and follow the Pakistani border before briefly entering Afghanistan.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report
