All those on board a Pakistani passenger jet died Wednesday when the Airbus 321 crashed in the hills of Islamabad while trying to land on a flight from Karachi, a cabinet minister said.
"Nobody survived," Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Express TV.
Earlier reports had said that they were a handful of survivors, but asked whether all those aboard had died, Malik replied: "Yes, all of them are dead".
Imtiaz Elahi, the chairman of the Capital Development Authority, told The Associated Press that earlier reports of five survivors from the crash were wrong and that all aboard died. The Capital Development Authority has a group that responds to emergency situations.
There were conflicting reports over the number of people on the doomed plane. The civil aviation authority said there were 152 while police said there were 149.
Islamabad's police chief Bani Amin said that rescue workers had recovered all bodies from the site of the plane crash, in densely wooded hills outside the Pakistani capital.
"All bodies have been recovered. I cannot give you an exact number because most of them are in pieces," Bani Amin told AFP.
"According to our information, there were 149 people on board. The search is continuing. Maybe we will find one or two more," he said.
Rescue efforts
Rain had interrupted the airlifting of the bodies, but alternative arrangements have been made to bring them down the hillside on ropes should the weather not improve, Amin said.
The Airbus 321 operated by private airline Airblue from Karachi crashed into the Margalla Hills at around 9:45 am (0445 GMT) while preparing to land at Benazir Bhutto International Airport.
Three Pakistani army helicopters were aiding the rescue effort after Airbus-320 plane crashed into the Margalla hills, according to a text message from the military. Troops have also been despatched to the site, it said.
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, said Pervez George, a civil aviation official. He said the plane was flying from Karachi to Islamabad.
"The plane was about to land at the Islamabad airport when it lost contact with the control tower, and later we learned that the plane had crashed," George said.
"We regret to confirm there has been an accident with an Airbus aircraft and we will provide more information when we have more confirmed data available," Airbus spokesman Stefan Schaffrath said.
Pakistani news channels showed what appeared to be wreckage of the plane as helicopters hovered above the heavily forested hills to assess the situation. Fire was visible and smoke was blowing up from the scene.
Officials at first thought it was a small plane. But police official Mohammed Saeed said later that "it seems that it is a bigger tragedy."
Airbus accidents
At the Islamabad airport, hundreds of friends and relatives of those on board the flight swarmed ticket counters desperately seeking information. A large cluster of people also surrounded the list of passengers on the flight, which was posted near the Airblue ticket counter.
Raheel Ahmed, a spokesman for the airline, said an investigation would be launched, but that for now the focus was to find survivors. The plane was no more than eight years old, and it had no known technical issues, Ahmed said. He added that to his knowledge, the pilots had not sent any emergency signals.
Airblue flies within Pakistan as well as internationally to the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the United Kingdom.
The only previous recorded accident for Airblue, a carrier that began flying in 2004, was a tailstrike in May 2008 at Quetta airport by one of the airline's Airbus 321 jets. There were no casualties and damage was minimal, according to the U.S.-based Aviation Safety Network.
The Airbus 320 family of medium-range jets, which includes the 321 model that crashed Wednesday, is one of the most popular in the world, with about 4,000 jets delivered since deliveries began in 1988.
Twenty-one of the aircraft have been lost in accidents since then, according to the Aviation Safety Network's database. The deadliest was a 2007 crash at landing in Sao Paolo by Brazil's TAM airline, in which all 187 people on board perished, along with 12 others on the ground.
The last major plane crash in Pakistan was in July 2006 when a Fokker F-27 twin-engine aircraft operated by Pakistan International Airlines slammed into a wheat field on the outskirts of the central Pakistani city of Multan, killing all 45 people on board.
In August 1989, another PIA Fokker, with 54 people onboard, went down in northern Pakistan on a domestic flight. The plane's wreckage was never found.
In September 1992, a PIA Airbus A300 crashed into a mountain in Nepal, killing all 167 people on board. Investigators found the plane was flying 1,500 feet lower than it reported as it approached the Katmandu airport.
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