A plane that crashed in Afghanistan with six people on board was heading to Moscow

The plane crashed in the mountains of Afghanistan, in the northeast of the country, the person in charge of Badakhshan province said this Sunday, without providing details.

“The plane crashed, but the location is not specified. The villagers informed us about this,” Zabihullah Amiri, head of the provincial department of culture and information, told AFP.

There were six people on board the plane, including four crew members and two passengers. According to the Federal Air Transport Agency, four people survived, two were missing. Reuters.

According to the Interfax agency, the device was operating a charter ambulance flight from Gaya (India) to Tashkent (Uzbekistan), and then to Zhukovsky airport in Moscow.

The plane “stopped communicating and disappeared from radar screens,” Russian authorities said.

According to a source in the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, quoted by the official Russian news agency TASS, “the cause of the disaster, according to preliminary data, was the failure of both engines.”

The Russian Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviation) confirmed the disappearance of the plane.

The accident occurred in a remote mountainous region of the province, which crosses the Hindu Kutch massif, whose peaks reach more than 7,000 meters.

Although Afghan authorities initially believed that the crashed plane was Indian, India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation, however, via social media site X, denied 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 who do cross Afghan airspace in just a few minutes, flying over the sparsely populated Wakhan Corridor in Badakhshan province, a narrow strip between Tajikistan and Pakistan.