No Survivors At Afghan Crash Site

NATO soldiers found human remains but no survivors in the torn wreckage of an Afghan airliner Monday, four days after it struck a snowbound peak with 104 people on board.

Relatives swarmed toward the freezing mountain to retrieve the bodies, saying looters and wild animals might desecrate the corpses, but were turned back by Afghan security forces struggling to mount a recovery operation.

On Monday morning, clear skies allowed a Spanish Cougar helicopter to drop five Slovenian mountain troops onto the mountain top 20 miles east of Kabul, where they toiled through the deep snow to inspect several pieces of fuselage.

"They did find human remains," NATO spokeswoman Maj. Karen Tissot Van Patot said. It was impossible to say how many bodies the remains belonged to, she said. The troops were lifted out again as visibility deteriorated.

Officials expect all those aboard — most of them Afghans, but also including more than 20 foreigners — perished in what would be Afghanistan's worst aviation disaster.

The Boeing 737-200, flown by Kam Air, Afghanistan's first post-Taliban private airline, vanished Thursday as it approached Kabul airport in a snowstorm from the western city of Herat. There were 96 passengers and eight crew aboard.

NATO helicopters spotted parts of the wreckage some 11,000 feet up Chaperi Mountain on Saturday, but freezing fog, low cloud and up eight feet of snow had prevented teams from reaching the site.

By late Monday, 100 Afghan soldiers had clambered up the mountain to within 150 yards of the crash site, Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Zaher Azimi said. He said they would camp there overnight, and that medical teams would hopefully arrive on Tuesday to begin collecting the bodies.

"A hand might be here and a foot somewhere else, so it will very difficult," Azimi said. "As well as the cold and the snow, there could be mines up there. It will take weeks to complete our job."

Down below, Afghan soldiers and police manned checkpoints to stop family members and media from approaching the area to the fury of dozens of men eager to observe Muslim custom by quickly burying their dead.

Relatives fretted that wolves and vultures could feed on the victims and rumors spread of looters answering calls made to their mobile phones. One man brandished a tattered Kam Air ticket he said he found in a nearby village.

Some evaded the checkpoints but returned disheartened as even their sports-utility vehicles proved no match for the deep snow.

"How can I look at this white mountain, where part of my heart lies?" said a man named Azizi, whose uncle Shafa took the doomed plane on the way back from a business trip to Iran. "I have to move, I have to try."

Afghan officials say air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane just after it was given permission to land. But the airline believes it turned away from Kabul toward Pakistan in search of an alternative air strip before it hit the mountain.

The U.S. military sought Monday to quash speculation that the plane had been refused permission to land at the U.S. base at Bagram, north of the capital.

"It was never the intent, they were never denied," Maj. Clay Berardi, a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, said at a news conference. "Up unto the point that this aircraft impacted to ground, they were on a normal approach."

American experts are to help Afghan authorities investigate the crash, along with representatives of the other foreign victims.

Nine Turks, six Americans and three Italians were believed to have taken the flight, though a final list has yet to be released.

Three of those on board are believed to be American women working for Management Sciences for Health, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., said William Schiffbauer, a company representative in Kabul.

The company identified the women as Cristin "Cristi" Gadue, 26, from Burlington, Vt., a 2000 graduate of Tufts University who lives in Kabul; Amy Lynn Niebling, 29, a native of Omaha, Neb., who now lives in Somerville, Mass.; and Carmen Urdaneta, 32, who lives in Brookline, Mass., and grew up in Topeka, Kan.

Airline officials say the crew was made of up of six Russians and two Afghans, although Moscow said only four Russian citizens were missing.

Afghanistan's 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. The U.S. military has suffered a string of deadly air accidents in Afghanistan, most involving helicopters.