KABUL: A cargo plane belonging to an Azeri company and chartered by foreign troops crashed north of Kabul early on Wednesday with nine crew members on board, officials said, but it was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.
”On July 6, at 0010 Kabul time, an Il-76 cargo plane belonging to Silk Way Airlines and heading from Baku to Bagram, crashed 25 kilometres from Kabul,” Azeri state air company AZAL said in a statement.
”According to preliminary information, the crash may have been the result of a collision with an unknown object.”
Bagram is located around 45 km north of the Afghan capital and is home to the largest US air base in the country.
In the statement, AZAL said the plane was carrying 18 tonnes of cargo and had nine crew members on board. It did not give any more details on the condition of the crew members or the nature of the cargo. An AZAL official declined comment. Abdul Baseer Salangi, the provincial governor of Parwan, where Bagram is located, said the cargo plane was chartered by foreign troops and had crashed in a mountainous area of Siagerd district. A rescue team had been dispatched to the remote site.
”There was a big explosion when the aircraft hit the mountains late last night,” said Abdul Haleem, the district chief of Siagerd.
The plane did not belong to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, a spokesman for the force said.
Silk Way Airlines is a cargo airline based in Baku and the Ilyushin (IL-76) aircraft is a large Russian-made freighter able to transport outsized and heavy cargo.
Azerbaijan is part of what the United States refers to as the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) supplying military operations in Afghanistan, and which involves Russia, Latvia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
In October, a civilian cargo transport plane crashed into mountains near the Afghan capital Kabul, killing eight people on board — six Filipinos, one Indian national and a Kenyan. (Agencies)