Hot News India
No survivors found at Afg han airline crash site
KABUL, Afghanistan – Searchers found no survivors Friday among 44 people on board an Afghan commercial airliner that crashed this week on a remote mountain north of the capital of Kabul, the aviation minister
The Antonov-24 operated by Pamir Airways disappeared Monday on a flight from Kunduz to Kabul. The wreckage was spotted Thursday by a search plane on a 13,500-foot (4,100-meter) mountain in Shakar Darah district north of Kabul.
Aviation Minister Mohammadullah Batash told The Associated Press that ground searchers reached the site Friday but found no survivors.
Three Britons and one American were among eight foreign passengers on the plane along with nationals from Pakistan and Australia, according to chief aviation investigator Ghulam Farooq. He did not have precise numbers for Australian and Pakistani passengers.
Russia's Itar-Tass news agency said three Tajikistan citizens working for the airline were also aboard, possibly among the crew.
Photos supplied by NATO forces show the plane broken into four pieces and strewn across a steep mountainside about 24 miles (38 kilometers) north of Kabul. Bad weather and the rugged mountain terrain hampered the search.
Afghan military search teams collected body parts strewn among traces of snow on the high plateau where the plane went down, according to Associated Press Television News video. Parts of the aircraft slid down a ravine and slammed into a boulder.
The cause of the crash, which occurred in heavy fog, has not been determined. The airline denied allegations of lax safety procedures made by an American photojournalist who said she took a Pamir flight from Kunduz to Kabul on May 4.
Stephanie Sinclair said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that during the flight, the pilot allowed several passengers to enter the cockpit even though there was turbulence and bad weather. They remained there until the plane landed.
"The whole thing was extremely reckless behavior on everyone's part. I did complain to a Pamir flight attendant during the flight and then also to the airport office manager when we landed," Sinclair said. "I was assured by the flight attendant that it was 'perfectly safe' for there to be these irregularities."
Khalilullah Fruzi, a co-owner of Pamir, dismissed the allegations as "propaganda by our competitors."
"It is wrong, it is illegal," Fruzi said. "There is no additional space for another person in the cockpit. Our pilot was a Tajik-Russian and we never heard such allegations."
Kabul-based Pamir Airways, named after the mountain range of Central Asia, began operations in 1995. It has daily flights to major Afghan cities and flies to Dubai and Saudi Arabia for the hajj pilgrimage.
Pamir's chief executive officer, Amanullah Hamid, said the plane was last inspected about three months ago in Bulgaria. The An-24 is a medium-range twin-turboprop civil aircraft built in the former Soviet Union from 1950 to 1978. A modernized version is still made in China.
It is widely used by airlines in the developing world due to its rugged design, ease of maintenance and low operating costs.
Elsewhere, a NATO soldier was killed Friday by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, the alliance said without identifying him by nationality.
Also Friday, a roadside bomb exploded in Afghanistan's main southern city of Kandahar, killing one civilian and wounding three children, an official Said
UN Command to launch SKorea warship sinking pro
SEOUL, South Korea – The top U.S. diplomat said Friday that North Korea should face international consequences over the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship, while the South said the U.N. would investigate whether the attack violated the Korean War truce.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak called the sinking a "military provocation" and said it violated the U.N. Charter as well as the truce that ended the fighting in the 1950-53 conflict. But he called for a cautious response to this "serious and grave" issue.
Arriving in Tokyo ahead of a visit to Beijing and Seoul, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that U.S., Japan, South Korea and China are consulting on an appropriate reaction to an international investigation that blamed North Korea for the incident.
She said the report announced Thursday proves a North Korean sub fired a torpedo that sank the ship, the Cheonan on March 26 and that it could no longer be "business as usual" in dealing with the matter and that there must be "an international response."
While it was "premature" to discuss exact options or actions that will be taken in response, Clinton said it was "important to send a clear message to North Korea that provocative actions have consequences.
"The evidence is overwhelming and condemning. The torpedo that sunk the Cheonan ... was fired by a North Korean submarine," she told reporters.
North Korea said for a second day that war clouds loomed over the divided peninsula, and has asked to send its own team to investigate the site.
South Korean Defense Minister Kim Tae-young, speaking to reporters, called the request "irrational and incomprehensible."
Instead, Kim's ministry requested the U.N. Command's Military Armistice Commission, which oversees the truce, to conduct a probe separate from the multinational investigation.
"This incident was clearly a military attack against our naval warship that was carrying out a routine patrol operation — an explicit violation of the truce agreement," deputy defense minister Chang Kwang-il said.
The investigation can start as soon as this weekend, though North Korea will most likely reject access to investigators, Chang said. South Korea responded to the North's request to send investigators by telephone Friday, notifying it of the special U.N. probe.
"We were caught in a perfect military ambush by North Korea while our people were resting in the late hours," Lee said at an emergency national security meeting.
"Because this is a serious and important issue, I believe there must not be a single mistake in all of our responsive measures, and that we must be highly prudent," he said.
On Thursday, he vowed to take "resolute countermeasures" against the North. But military retaliation looked too dangerous and less of an option given the vulnerability of South Korea's capital, Seoul, and its 10 million some residents to North Korean artillery located just across the border.
Conflict-of-interest fears raised in oil spill tests
Local environmental officials throughout the Gulf Coast are feverishly collecting water, sediment and marine animal tissue samples that will be used in the coming months to help track pollution levels resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, since those readings will be used by the federal government and courts to establish liability claims against BP. But the laboratory that officials have chosen to process virtually all of the samples is part of an oil and gas services company in Texas that counts oil firms, including BP, among its biggest clients.
Some people are questioning the independence of the Texas lab. Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental official for Escambia County, Fla., rebuffed instructions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to send water samples to the lab, which is based at TDI-Brooks International in College Station, Tex
No comments:
Post a Comment