Wreckage of Afghan Jet Found on Peak

NATO troops spotted the wreckage of a missing Afghan commercial plane Saturday, and officials said it appeared that none of the 104 people aboard could have survived the crash in a rugged mountain area.

Of the 96 passengers, at least 19 were foreigners: at least six Americans, nine Turks, an Italian naval captain, two other Italians and an Iranian working for a nongovernmental organization. Six of the eight crew members were also foreigners, four of them Russian.

Beth Lee, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, said three of the six Americans had yet to be identified.

The three Americans previously reported to have been on the flight worked for Management Sciences for Health, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization working on public health issues.

Rescue teams flying Apache helicopters spotted the tail of the Kam Air Boeing 737-200 about 20 miles southeast of Kabul, the capital.

Afghan authorities said weather conditions prevented immediate access to the site.

“We flew over the area and saw parts of the plane but nothing else, because our helicopters could not land on the mountain. The snow and wind were too much at such a high altitude,” Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi said.

The mountain, in the Chapari Ghar area, is said to be more than 10,000 feet above sea level and is part of a steep range encircling the Kabul valley.

“It’s too early to determine what exactly happened to the plane, but after seeing the conditions on the mountain today we strongly believe that bad weather conditions and poor visibility caused it to slam into the mountainside,” Azimi said.

The flight, which took off from the western city of Herat, disappeared from radar during a snowstorm late Thursday afternoon after it was unable to land at Kabul International Airport because of poor weather. The plane was leased from a company in Kyrgyzstan.

More than 1,000 Afghan soldiers, 100 North Atlantic Treaty Organization ground troops and several aerial crews are involved in the recovery operations, which were expected to resume today.