“There were screams everywhere”, says Mohammad Zubair, one of the two survivors Airbus A320 crash on Friday in a residential area of Karachi, the big city in southern Pakistan, in which 97 people died. (Video at the bottom of the article) After the plane hit the ground, “I regained consciousness“and”I saw fire everywhere. No one was visible “, recalls the 24-year-old, whose 53-second interview from his hospital bed went viral on social media. “There were cries of children, adults and the elderly, cries everywhere. Everyone was trying to survive. “”I opened my seat belt, saw the light and tried to go in that direction. It worked. From there I jumped“out of the aircraft,” he continues in a clear voice, his face visibly unscathed after the disaster.
According to an official from the Ministry of Health in Sindh, the province of which Karachi is the capital, Mohammad Zubair suffers from burns, but his condition is stable. The other miraculous is the president of the Bank of Punjab, one of the largest banks in the country, Zafar Masud, said the president of the company Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), Arshad Malik.
The black box found
The PIA A320 from Lahore crashed into a residential area as it approached Karachi Airport early Friday afternoon after a technical failure, killing 97 of the 99 people on board, including eight crew members, according to multiple sources. Only four people were injured on the ground, authorities said, after initial reports of deaths among residents on Friday. Rescue operations ended at dawn on Saturday, authorities said. All through Friday, rescuers and residents had searched the rubble for bodies. An AFP journalist saw several charred bodies loaded on board an ambulance.
Flight PK8303 “lost contact with air traffic control at 2:37 pm” Friday (09:37 GMT), said PIA spokesman Abdullah Hafeez. A recording authenticated by a PIA spokesperson heard a pilot distress call from the control tower, in which he declared: “We have lost the enginesThe plane’s black box was found and passed on to investigators, CEO Arshad Malik announced on Saturday evening. While the pilot was experienced, according to Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan, the aircraft service in 2004, was under the colors of PIA only since 2014, according to an Airbus press release.
Stuck in the emergency exit
“I saw a passenger off the plane. (…) He was alive. He was talking. He asked me to save him but his legs were trapped in the emergency exit”said Raja Amjad, a witness who had previously seen a corpse “fall on his car“.
Sarfraz Ahmed, a firefighter, told AFP that many of the victims were still wearing their seat belts.
At least 21 people have so far been identified, some of whom have already been buried. A major, who died with his wife and two children, received a military funeral, his coffin covered with the national flag, AFP noted. At least two other officers were buried in Karachi.
DNA tests are performed at the University of Karachi to determine who the other victims are.
According to Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the plane had on board “many people returning home for Eid” el-Fitr, the celebration of the end of Ramadan, the most important holiday for Muslims.
The accident comes just days after the country authorized the resumption of domestic commercial flights, suspended for more than a month to combat the spread of the new coronavirus. Very few international flights had been maintained. Frequent civil and military aircraft and helicopter crashes have occurred in Pakistan over the years. The last major air accident in the country dates back to December 2016. A PIA plane carrying out an internal flight had crashed in the mountainous North, killing 47 people.
PIA was one of the world’s major airlines until the 1970s. But years of financial loss, mismanagement and delays have tarnished its reputation.
The company has been involved in numerous controversies. Between March and November 2007, all of its fleet except eight aircraft had been placed on the European Union’s blacklist.
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