Airplane crash in Pakistan kills 152 people

Initial Interior Ministry reports that five people survived the Airblue crash were wrong, said Imtiaz Elahi, chairman of the Capital Development Authority, which deals with emergencies and reports to the ministry.

"The situation at the site of the crash is heartbreaking," Elahi told The Associated Press. "It is a great tragedy, and I confirm it with pain that there are no survivors."

The dead included two U.S. citizens, the spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Richard Snelsire, said without providing further details.

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 AP 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 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, but Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar said the government does not suspect terrorism.

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, said Pervez George, a civil aviation official.

Airblue is a private service based in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, and Wednesday's flight was believed to be carrying mostly Pakistanis.

Rescue workers scouring the heavily forested hills recovered nearly 80 bodies from the wreckage, said Pakistan's National Disaster Management Authority in a statement.

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