17 die in Pakastani plane crash

KOHAT, Pakistan -- A Pakistani military plane crashed into a mountainside in dense fog Thursday in a remote region of northwestern Pakistan, killing all 17 people on board, including Chief of the Air Force Mushaf Ali Mir, 57.\nThe Fokker-27 turboprop lost contact with the control tower at the Kohat Air Base shortly before it was to land there, Pakistani officials said.\n"This was an accident," Air Commodore Sarfraz Ahmad told reporters in Islamabad, ruling out the possibility that the plane had been shot down on the edge of Pakistan's lawless tribal region. He said a board of inquiry will determine what caused the accident.\nThe crash killed the chief of the air force who was traveling from Islamabad to Kohat to conduct an annual inspection of the air base. He was accompanied by his wife, seven other air force officials and eight crew members when the plane went down about 16 miles from the base, Ahmad said.\n"This is a national tragedy," Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali said, according to the Information Ministry.\nInvestigators were already at the site of the crash, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad. Kohat, a town of 100,000 people ringed by mountains, is less than 50 miles from the border with Afghanistan.\nA large piece of the plane's tail hugged the side of a 3,000-foot mountain. Strewn across the slope were other pieces of the aircraft, witnesses said.\nThe air force plane took off from Islamabad at 8 a.m. local time and was last heard from 27 minutes after takeoff. There were no distress calls from the aircraft, Ahmad told reporters.\nResidents of the area said fog was heavy Thursday morning when the aircraft went down.\nThe vice chief of the Pakistan air force, Syed Qaiser Hussain, has been appointed acting air force chief, Ahmad said.\nMir was born in the eastern city of Lahore and joined the air force in 1967. A decorated former fighter pilot who took part in Pakistan's 1971 war against India, Mir took command of the air force in November 2000. He had two sons and a daughter.\n"He was an excellent commander, and a hard core professional," Air Commodore Tahir Butt said of Mir. "He was very considerate. At times he would be very informal in wanting to know about the problems of his men"