UN grounds plane after Afghan Jet crash
Pakistan Times Monitoring Report

KABUL (Afghanistan): The United Nations has grounded a sister plane to the airliner which ploughed into an mountainside killing all 104 people on board in Afghanistan’s worst air accident, an official said Wednesday.

UN Humanitarian Air Services, which can be used only by staff from the world body and aid agencies, said it was suspending operations by a Boeing 737 hired from the same firm as the Kam Air 737 which crashed Thursday.

“It is a precautionary measure until we find the causes of the accident, to reassure our clients,” said an official from the air service in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The UN and the Kam Air 737s were both chartered from Phoenix, a United Arab Emirates-based leasing company.

Passengers stuck in Dubai

Meanwhile dozens of passengers were stuck in Dubai after Kam Air cancelled several flights since Friday, witnesses said. Along with the Afghan national airline Ariana, the UN and Kam Air are the only carriers linking the city with Kabul.

Kam Air, Afghanistan’s first private airline, denied having technical or logistical problems. “We have enough planes to operate but the weather is getting worse,” deputy chief Feda Mohammad Fadawi said. Asked if Kam Air was scared of running aircraft after the crash, he replied: “No, we are not scared but we don’t want to risk our flights.”

The Kam Air 737 hit a 3,300-metre (9,900-feet) mountain on Thursday and broke into fragments after hitting snowstorms during a domestic flight from the western city of Herat to Kabul.

A committee of international and Afghan representatives set up to investigate the disaster confirmed late Tuesday that all 96 passengers and eight crew members died.

Twenty-four of the victims were foreigners. The US National Transportation Safety Board said it had sent a five-member team to help the probe because the plane was manufactured in the United States.●