A Russian plane, with six people on board, crashed in a mountainous area of northeastern Afghanistan, the Russian civil aviation agency, Rosaviatsia, reported Sunday. It was later reported that four passengers survived and a status report on the other two is expected in the next few hours.
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"On the night of Saturday 20 January, while in the airspace of Afghanistan (...), a Falcon 10 aircraft registered in the State registry of civil aircraft of the Russian Federation stopped communicating and disappeared from radars"explained Rosaviatsia in a statement.
On board the French-made aircraft, owned by Athletic Group and an individual, were six people on board: four crew members and two passengers of Russian nationality.
The Russian Anna Evsyukova, who was accompanied by her husband Anatoly Evsyukov, was flown from Thailand for medical reasons with the participation of an insurance company, the Russian embassy in Bangkok informed TASS.
The aircraft made a sanitary flight between the Indian city of Gaya and the Russian city of Zhukovsky, stopping at the capital of Uzbekistan, Tashkent. The aircraft’s initial departure point was the Thai airport of Utapao.
According to preliminary information, the incident occurred in the Badakhshan region. Parts of Badakhshan are under the jurisdiction of two countries: Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
"According to information from the Russian embassy in Afghanistan: the local ground search and rescue service found the Falcon 10 aircraft, of the six people on board the plane, preliminary: four are alive (have various injuries), the fate of two people is becoming clear", reported the department hours later.
The Ministry of Transport and Aviation of the government formed by the Taliban movement (banned in the Russian Federation) confirmed this information, according to the Russian agency TASS.