According to Russian authorities, it was a Falcon 10 aircraft owned by Athletic Group LLC and a private individual that was carrying six people on board, including four crew members and two passengers.
According to a statement from the Interfax news agency, the device performed a charter ambulance flight on a route from Gaya (India) to Tashkent (Uzbekistan) and then to Zhukovsky Airport in Moscow.
The plane “stopped communication and disappeared from radar screens,” Russian authorities said.
According to a source in the Russian emergency service, quoted by the official Russian news agency TASS, “according to preliminary information, the cause of the accident was the failure of both engines.”
The accident occurred on Saturday evening in a difficulttoaccess mountainous area of Badakhshan province. According to Afghan authorities, a team was sent to the site, which is about eight hours' drive from the provincial capital.
Although Afghan authorities initially assumed that the crashed aircraft was an Indian aircraft, the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation denied via the social network X that any of its aircraft were involved in the incident.
International airlines have avoided flying over Afghanistan since the Taliban took over the country in 2021. Those who do so cross Afghan airspace for just a few minutes as they fly over the sparsely populated Wakhan corridor in Badakhshan province, a narrow strip between Tajikistan and Pakistan.
Also read: Plane crash in mountainous region of Afghanistan
All messages. Every minute.
Eighth consecutive year of consumer choice for online press.
Download our free app.