Russian private jet believed to have crashed in northeastern Afghanistan

A Russian private jet carrying six people is believed to have crashed in a remote area of rural Afghanistan, authorities said.

In Moscow, Russian civil aviation authorities said on Sunday that a Dassault Falcon 10 went missing with four crew members and two passengers on board.

The Russian-registered aircraft “stopped communicating and disappeared from radar screens,” authorities said. It described the flight as starting from Thailand’s U-Tapao–Rayong – Pattaya International Airport.

Earlier, Afghan regional spokesman Zabihullah Amiri said a passenger plane had crashed on Saturday evening in a mountainous area near Zebak district in Badakhshan province.

"The plane has crashed but the location is not known yet. We have sent teams but they have not arrived yet," Amiri told AFP news agency.

Zebak is some 250 kilometres (155 miles) northeast of Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, a rural, mountainous area, home to only several thousand people.

Badakhshan police chief's office also confirmed the report of a crash in a statement.

However, a Taliban statement from Abdul Wahid Rayan, a spokesman for the Taliban’s Information and Culture Ministry, described the plane as “belonging to a Moroccan company" and blamed an “engine problem” for the crash.

Indian civil aviation officials similarly described the aircraft as Moroccan-registered, after earlier it was mistakenly reported to be an Indian plane.

The discrepancy in the accounts could not be immediately reconciled.

Conflicting statements

Russian officials said the missing plane they reported belongs to Athletic Group LLC and a private individual.

It had reportedly been operating as a charter ambulance flight on a route from Gaya, India, to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, onward to Zhukovsky International Airport in Moscow.

The Associated Press could not immediately reach its owners. They also said the Falcon 10 involved in the crash had been built in 1978.

Tracking data from FlightRadar24 for the aircraft, analysed by the AP, showed the aircraft's last position just south of the city of Peshawar, Pakistan, at around 1330 GMT on Saturday.

International carriers have largely voided Afghanistan since the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of the country.

Those that briefly fly over rush through Afghan airspace for only a few minutes while over the sparsely populated Wakhan Corridor in Badakhshan province, a narrow panhandle that juts out of the east of the country between Tajikistan and Pakistan, before continuing their way.

Typically, aircraft heading toward the corridor make a sharp turn north around Peshawar and follow the Pakistani border before briefly entering Afghanistan. Zebak is just near the start of the Wakhan Corridor.