Wreckage of Afghan airliner found

CHENARI, Afghanistan -- NATO helicopter gunships found the shattered wreckage of a missing Afghan airliner on a frigid mountain east of the capital Saturday, and officials said they believed none of the 104 people aboard could have survived the crash.

Six Americans were believed to have been on board, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said, double the number previously reported.

Afghan police struggled through deep snow to within sight of the scattered debris, but reported no sign of life beyond scavenging animals and birds and were forced back by darkness and plummeting temperatures.

"So far we don't think there are any survivors," said Lutfullah Mashal, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Interior. "The plane is completely destroyed."

The Boeing 737-200, flown by Kam-Air, post-Taliban Afghanistan's first private airline, vanished from radar screens Thursday afternoon as it approached Kabul airport in a snowstorm, sparking a massive search operation for the 96 passengers and eight crew, at least 24 of them foreigners.

If all are confirmed dead, it would be this war-wracked nation's deadliest air disaster.

Officials said there was no indication that the scheduled flight, which was arriving from the western Afghan city of Herat, was hijacked or brought down by a bomb.

Afghan transport minister Enayatullah Qasemi said the cause of the crash remained a mystery and that U.S. Department of Transportation experts as well as representatives of the foreign victims would help investigate.

NATO said two of its Dutch Apache helicopters spotted the tail of the plane Saturday afternoon, lying at an altitude of 11,000 feet on the side of Chaperi Mountain, 20 miles east of Kabul.

Helicopters then dropped a Slovenian mountain rescue team to the scene, but Qasemi said nobody reached the wreckage before nightfall.

"Tomorrow, we plan to use helicopters to quickly start recovering the bodies, the minister said at a news conference. "It's not an easy job and it will take time."

Gen. Mahbub Amiri, an Afghan police commander who got as far as the village of Chenari, at the foot of the mountain, said 30 of his men got within a half-mile of the crash site. They saw no bodies among the pieces of plane jutting from the snow, but reported that wild animals and birds had been attracted to the scene.

"No way" could anyone have survived, Amiri said.

Kam Air began flying in November 2003, and its flights on leased Boeing and Antonov planes are popular with wealthy Afghans and also used by aid and reconstruction workers.

However, there have been concerns about the safety of its planes as well as those of state-owned Ariana Airlines, as well as the approach through the mountains that ring Kabul. The airport only recently installed an electronic landing system and still relies on the main U.S. base at Bagram, to the north, for radar.

U.N. staff are banned from using Kam Air or Ariana. However, a spokeswoman confirmed Saturday that an Italian architect working for the world body was on board. Italian authorities said another Italian civilian and a navy captain were among the 96 passengers.

Beth Lee, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, said it believed six Americans were on board. She declined to give details. Management Sciences for Health, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already confirmed three of its staff took the plane.

Nine Turkish passengers, as well as the eight crew -- six Russians and two Afghans -- were also believed dead.

Qasemi said there were passengers from "at least five" foreign countries, suggesting that the expatriate total could rise.

The last major plane crash in Afghanistan was on Nov. 27 last year, when a transport plane under contract to the U.S. military crashed in central mountains, killing three American soldiers and three American civilian crew.

The most recent commercial crash was on March 19, 1998, when an Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 slammed into a peak south of Kabul, killing all 45 passengers and crew.