KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 4 -- U.S., NATO and Afghan forces suspended the search late Friday for an Afghan airliner that was carrying at least three American aid workers and 101 other passengers and crew when it disappeared Thursday in a snowstorm near Kabul.
The search by Black Hawk and Apache helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles and hundreds of ground troops was suspended until Saturday morning, said Maj. Karen Tisset van Patot, spokeswoman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). She said darkness and freezing fog had enveloped the mountainous terrain southeast of the capital where the plane was last spotted on radar screens.
Afghan police and army forces search the mountainous region south of Kabul for a Kam Air plane that disappeared on Thursday.
(Emilio Morenatti -- AP)
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The sequence and substance of the last communications between the pilot of the Kam Air Boeing 737-200 and air traffic controllers remained unclear Friday evening.
Enayatullah Qasemi, the Afghan transport minister, said at news conference Friday morning that the pilot had contacted Kabul's airport control tower, which was manned by ISAF forces, just prior to taking off from the western city of Herat early Thursday afternoon. Qasemi said the pilot inquired about the weather in Kabul and was told conditions were fine.
Asked why air traffic controllers had not warned the pilot that the weather might change in the approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes the flight would take, Qasemi responded, "It depends on the pilot to decide whether he wants to take off or not."
At about 3 p.m., as the plane approached Kabul, the pilot contacted Bagram air base, the U.S. military facility north of Kabul that has overall control of Afghan air space, according to Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi, a defense ministry spokesman. He said controllers at Bagram gave the flight permission to enter Kabul air space in order to land at either Bagram or Kabul airports.
The pilot next contacted the Kabul airport and was cleared to land, Azimi said, but the plane dropped off the radar screen before the pilot could reply.
However, Azimi's account contradicted news service reports that Kabul airport controllers told the plane it was not safe to land. On Friday, an account circulating in Kabul and Herat said the pilot had requested permission to land at Bagram but was denied.
Azimi, who appeared on a radio call-in show broadcast by Voice of America late Friday, strongly rebutted that version when asked about it by a caller from Herat. U.S. military officials said they were looking into the matter.
The exact number of foreigners on the flight was also unclear. Three of the passengers were American women who worked for Management Sciences for Health (MSH), a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization.
In a statement on its Web site, MSH identified the women as Cristin Gadue, 26, of Burlington, Vt.; Amy Lynn Niebling, 29, of Omaha; and Carmen Urdaneta, 32, who was born in Venezuela and raised in Kansas.
"In this time of grief, we can be thankful that Cristi, Amy and Carmen were able to devote themselves to work that they loved and truly believed in doing," Jonathan Quick, the organization's president and chief executive officer, said in the statement.
The three had come to Afghanistan for a visit of several weeks to assess MSH's projects around the country.
William Schiffbauer, the Kabul program manager for MSH, said in a telephone interview that the organization was funded primarily by USAID and provides grants to smaller nongovernmental organizations for health clinics and health care training in 13 Afghan provinces.
The airline said the jet was carrying 96 passengers, along with six Russian and two Afghan crew members, according to the Associated Press. The Turkish government said nine of its nationals were aboard the missing plane. Six were employees of Gulsan-Cukurova, a contracting firm working on a U.S.-funded road project in the west, company manager Kurtulus Ergin said.
In Rome, the Italian Defense Ministry told the AP that one of the passengers was Capt. Bruno Vianini, who was assigned to a military-sponsored reconstruction project.
Kam Air, the country's only private airline, began operating in November 2003, flying leased aircraft between Kabul, Dubai and Istanbul, and along several domestic routes.
In September, a Russian Antonov-24 operated by the airline slid off the runway while landing in Kabul, slightly injuring some of the 27 passengers aboard, apparently after engine trouble.
