Thick cloud cover and deep snow kept police, North Atlantic Treaty Organization helicopters and even a seasoned local hunter from reaching the wreckage of an Afghan commercial airliner yesterday, three days after it hit a mountain, killing all 104 people on board.
Among those who died were 21 foreigners, including a Canadian pilot of dual nationality, two employees of a U.S. engineering firm and three women who worked for a Boston-based aid agency. An Afghan general was also a victim of the crash, the worst air disaster in Afghanistan's history.
Fog, freezing temperatures and more than two metres of snow thwarted efforts to reach the crash site of the Kam Air Boeing 737-200, which was found Saturday about 30 kilometres east of Kabul.
A spokesman for Kam Air said that the crew was made up of six Russians and two Afghans, and that the pilot also had a Canadian passport. André Lemay, a spokesman for Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, said officials had contacted the pilot's widow in Canada, and she declined to have her husband's name released.
NATO helicopters ferried Slovenian mountain rescue teams yesterday to the site, some 3,350 metres up Chaperi Mountain, but by late afternoon they had failed to land.
The alliance released a photograph of the plane's white tail fin jutting from the snow on a bleak ridge. No other wreckage or bodies could be seen, though NATO soldiers near the scene said larger sections littered the other side of the mountain.
"The conditions were very, very poor," alliance spokeswoman Major Karen Tissot Van Patot said. Planes and ground troops would try again early this morning, she said, adding that troops consulted local Afghans "to see if we can find a back trail."
An Associated Press photographer and a dozen Afghan intelligence-service agents failed with that approach yesterday.
Boi Khan, a 50-year-old guide, said he knew the mountain well from his boyhood and hunting trips. He told the exhausted party they would die if they did not turn around after six hours of slogging on foot through the deep snow.
"It was too dangerous. We had no food or heat," he said, emptying the snow from his rubber boots upon his return. "But we were less than two hours away and I'm willing to try again."
German soldiers in a convoy of armoured vehicles also turned back after forging a path along a snowy road, while more than 300 Afghan police got no further than a village in the valley below because of poor visibility.
The plane flown by Kam Air, post-Taliban Afghanistan's first private airline, vanished from radar screens Thursday while approaching Kabul airport in a snowstorm from the western city of Herat.
The airline believes the plane turned toward the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, searching for an easier landing, but encountered more bad weather. There was no indication that the scheduled flight was hijacked or brought down by a bomb.
"Maybe the pilot was not familiar with the area and he was in a lower position than he should have been," said Feda Mohammed Fedayi, Kam Air's deputy director. "The only reason we can suggest at this time is the weather."
Kam Air began flying in November, 2003, and its flights are popular with wealthy Afghans and foreign aid workers. However, there has been concern about the safety of its leased planes as well as the proximity of the mountains to Kabul airport, and United Nations officials are banned from flying on Kam Air flights.
Afghanistan's most recent commercial crash occurred March 19, 1998, when an Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 slammed into a peak south of Kabul, killing all 45 passengers and crew.