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Kam Air Flight 904


The Kam Air Flight 904 disaster was an aviation disaster in February 2005. The incident took place on the afternoon on February 3 (local time), when a private Kam Air Boeing 737-200 jet aircraft (registered EX-037, which was originally delivered to Nordair as C-GNDR in 1980) in Afghanistan went missing during a domestic flight from the western city of Herat to Kabul International Airport in the capital of Kabul to the east. The crash is the deadliest air disaster in Afghan history.

The aircraft lost communication during a snowstorm. The cause of the loss of communication, and the subsequent crash, is presently unknown. However clearance to land at Bagram was refused as reported in Kam Air 904 Crash. Taliban leader Mullah Dadullah said his guerrilla fighters had not shot down the plane and expressed sadness at the crash. Air traffic control for Afghanistan is provided by the US occupation force operating out of the Bagram airport. Bagram has become a US airbase and is the closest airport to Kabul where 904 could divert to land safely. A NATO search-and-rescue operation was launched, and the tail of the plane was sighted from two Dutch Apache helicopters at around 9:30 a.m. UTC. The plane was at about 20 km (12.5 miles) east of Kabul, in remote mountainous terrain on the side of Chaperi Mountain at an altitude of 11,000 feet. All 104 people on board are most likely dead, and the plane was completely destroyed.

Of the 104 people on board, 96 were passengers and eight were crew. At least 24 were foreign nationals: six Americans, one Iranian, three Italians, nine Turks and four Russians as well as the captain, who held dual citizenship in Canada and Russia. According to reports, the Russians were crew members, the Turks were civilians working for Turkey-based firms, and the Italians included an architect working for the United Nations, as well as another Italian civilian and a navy captain.

Three of the six Americans on board were women working for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Management Science for Health company. These were Cristin "Cristi" Gadue, 26, of Burlington, Vermont; Amy Lynn Niebling, 29, of Somerville, Massachusetts; and Carmen Urdaneta, 32, of Brookline, Massachusetts. Gadue had been working in Kabul since September 2003, while Niebling and Urdaneta were on a three-week trip in Afghanistan and were going to return to Cambridge on the weekend following the crash.

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