“On the evening of Saturday, January 20, a Falcon 10 aircraft registered in the state register of civil aircraft of the Russian Federation in Afghan airspace (…) stopped communicating and disappeared from radar screens,” Russian civil aviation said Police officer Rossaviatsia in a statement. “According to preliminary information, there were six people on board the plane: four crew members and two passengers,” the source said.
Four people were found alive while two others were still missing on Sunday, Russia's Federal Civil Aviation Agency Rossaviatsia said. “The local ground search and rescue service has located the Falcon 10 aircraft,” Rossaviatsia initially stated in a final press release.
“Of the six people who were on board the aircraft, four are estimated to be alive (suffering from various injuries) and the fate of two people is under review,” Rossaviatsia continued. The Afghan authorities have also confirmed this toll.
“The pilot has been found,” we can read in a press release from the Afghan Ministry of Transport and Aviation on X (formerly Twitter). “According to the pilot, four people on board, including him, are still alive. The search team (…) is looking for the other people,” he continued.
According to Rossaviatsia, the Falcon 10 in question, a business jet, “was built in 1978 by the French company Dassault Aviation. The aircraft is owned by Athletic Group LLC and a private individual.”
According to the Russian press agency Ria Novosti, the plane was carrying out a private medical flight between Gaya (India) – Tashkent (Uzbekistan) – Zhukovsky (Russia), on board there was a “bedridden patient in a serious condition” and her husband, who did so These two people paid for the flight because, according to this source, they are Russian citizens.
Russian investigators announced the opening of an investigation into “violation of safety regulations (…) which resulted in the death of two or more people through negligence.”
According to the Belarusian television channel Belsat, the occupants of the plane are Anna and Anatoly Yevsiukov, who chartered this private plane after the woman fell ill during a vacation in Thailand.
For his part, an official from the information department of Afghanistan's Badakhshan province, Zabihullah Amiri, told AFP that he had been “informed by villagers” that a plane had crashed in this region on the border with Tajikistan, China and Pakistan.
The accident occurred in a difficult-to-access mountainous area of this province, which is crossed by the Hindu Kouch massif and has peaks over 7,000 meters high. The accident area was “about eight hours’ drive” from the provincial capital Faizabad, Amiri said.