plane crash pakistan

Imtiaz Elahi, the chairman of the Capital Development Authority, told The Associated Press that earlier reports of five survivors from the crash were wrong and that all aboard died. The Capital Development Authority has a group that responds to emergency situations.

The cause of Wednesday’s Airblue crash was not immediately clear. It attempted to land in rainy and cloudy conditions.

ISLAMABAD (AP) — A passenger jet carrying 152 people crashed Wednesday into the hills surrounding Pakistan’s capital amid poor weather, killing at least 50 people and stoking fears nobody could have survived the disaster.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said five people survived the crash of the Airblue plane and were airlifted to a hospital in Islamabad. But doctors reported no sign of survivors at the city’s two largest hospitals, and rescue workers at the scene expressed skepticism that anyone could have survived.

“Now we are pretty sure that there is not a single survivor,” Hanif Khattak, the director general of Pakistan’s Civil Defense, told The Associated Press near the crash site.

Local TV footage showed twisted metal wreckage hanging from trees and scattered across the ground on a bed of broken branches. Fire was visible and smoke rose from the scene as a helicopter hovered above. The army said it was sending special troops to aid the search.

“I’m seeing only body parts,” Dawar Adnan, a rescue worker with the Pakistan Red Crescent, told The Associated Press by telephone from the crash site. “This is a very horrible scene. We have scanned almost all the area, but there is no chance of any more survivors.”

The search effort was hampered by muddy conditions and smoldering wreckage that authorities were having trouble extinguishing by helicopter, Adnan said.

The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, said Pervez George, a civil aviation official. The plane left the southern city of Karachi at 7:45 a.m. for a two-hour scheduled flight to Islamabad and was trying to land during cloudy and rainy weather.