Bangladeshi passenger plane with 71 on board crashes in Nepal

A Bangladeshi plane with 67 passengers on board crashed near Kathmandu airport Monday as it was coming in to land, officials said, as firefighters battled to extinguish the burning wreckage and rescue passengers.
Plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from the football pitch where the plane crashed, to the east of the runway at Nepal’s only international airport, in the capital Kathmandu.
“There were 67 passengers and 4 crew members” aboard the plane, said airport spokesperson Prem Nath Thakur.
“So far 20 injured have been taken to the hospital. Police and army are trying to cut apart the plane to rescue others,” he added.
Live footage posted on Facebook showed the towering columns of smoke rising behind the runway, where another plane stood waiting on the tarmac.Emergency vehicles appeared to be heading into the smoke as people watched from a distance or filmed on their mobile phones.Nepal has suffered a number of air disasters in recent years, dealing a blow to its tourist industry.
All 66 onboard dead as passenger plane crashes in central Iran
Its poor air safety record has been blamed largely on inadequate maintenance, inexperienced pilots and substandard management.
In early 2016, a Twin Otter turboprop aircraft slammed into a mountainside in Nepal killing all 23 people on board.
Two days later, two pilots were killed when a small passenger plane crash-landed in the country’s hilly midwest.

A private Turkish plane with 11 people on board, all women, crashed in Iran on Sunday while taking the daughter of a top businessman and her friends back home to Turkey from a celebration in the United Arab Emirates.
Turkish and Iranian officials said there were eight passengers and three crew aboard the plane which crashed in the south of Iran while flying from Sharjah to Istanbul.
Media reports in Turkey said the eight passengers were Mina Basaran, the daughter of a leading Turkish businessman, and her seven friends who had spent the past days in the UAE to celebrate her marriage.
The crew, including the two pilots, were also all female, the reports said.
The reports, carried by the Hurriyet daily and several Turkish TV channels, said the Bombardier Challenger 604 private plane belonged to the Basaran Holding company of Mina’s father Huseyin.
The Istanbul-based Basaran Holding Company is active in the energy, construction and tourism sectors. It also owns hotels.
Reports said that just a day before, the eight young women had posted a picture on social media of themselves smiling and relaxing in Dubai.
The reports said that Mina Basaran had also posted a picture on social media of her boarding the same Bombardier plane before it left Istanbul for the UAE.
She had become engaged in October and the UAE trip was a traditional “farewell” to her friends before marriage.
Mina Basaran, 28, had become a board member of her father’s company already in 2013, Turkish reports said.
Iranian media said the plane went down in a remote mountain in the snow-capped Zagros range during bad weather.
The plane had left the emirate of Sharjah and went down near the city of Shahr-e Kord, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of Tehran, Iranian state television reported.
Reza Jafarzadeh, head of the Iran Civil Aviation Organisation, confirmed it had eight passengers and three crew members on board.
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear.
Hurriyet said both pilots on the plane were women as was the crew member, meaning all those on board are female.
One pilot was a former Turkish army fighter jet who had been one of Turkey’s first female pilots, it said. The other had worked in the past for flag carrier Turkish Airlines.
Tasnim news agency quoted an ICAO official as saying: “The plane is on fire. After the pilot asked to lower altitude, it disappeared from the radar.”
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