KARACHI, Pakistan
Twelve people, including two pilots, were killed in a helicopter crash in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday, an official said.
The crash took place in the suburbs of northwestern Mansehra district, located some 140 kilometers (87 miles) off the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, district police chief Najeeb Rehman told reporters.
The ill-fated MI-17 helicopter passengers included a 10-member team of Pakistani army’s medical corps apart from its two pilots. The dead included senior officers of the Pakistani army, including five majors, a military official told Anadolu Agency.
The aircraft had taken off from the garrison city of Rawalpindi to take part in ongoing rescue-and-relief operations in flood-hit northern Gilgit district near the border with China.
Preliminary reports cited bad weather as the prime reason for the crash. Eyewitnesses told police that the aircraft caught fire in the air and then hit a mountain in the area.
It took rescue workers at least two hours to reach the crash site due to the difficult mountainous terrain, Mushtaq Ghani, information minister of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told reporters.
Earlier in the day, another helicopter of the Pakistan Air Force had crashed in the tourist Chitral Valley near the Afghanistan border, which left several people injured. The PAF helicopter was also engaged in rescue operations in flood-hit areas.
On May 8, the ambassadors of Norway and the Philippines were among seven people killed in a helicopter crash in the northern Gilgit district's Niltar valley, a popular skiing destination near the border with China.
