A Pakistan International Airlines flight crashed Wednesday near Abbottabad, Pakistan, officials said.
The airline said the ATR-42 aircraft was carrying 48 people — 42 passengers, five crew members and one ground engineer — when it lost contact with a control tower on its way from Chitral to Islamabad.
Pop star-turned-preacher Junaid Jamshed was among those on board Flight PK-661, his manager, Arsalan Khan, told CNN.
Jamshed soared to fame in the 1980s with Vital Signs, one of the most iconic pop bands in Pakistan.
After a successful career as a solo singer in the 1990s, Jamshed gave up pop stardom to focus on religious music, or “nasheeds.”
His last tweet, posted Sunday, showed pictures of “Heaven on Earth” in Chitral — the northern Pakistan city where the plane took off.
Authorities have not given a number of casualties.
The ATR-42, a twin-engine propeller plane, is a workhorse of short-haul flying. The aircraft’s manufacturer, ATR, is a joint venture between Airbus Group and Italy’s Leonardo.
Pakistan, with about 190 million people, has thriving domestic air operations, connecting points across the country.
But it has a checkered air safety history and suffered three fatal commercial air crashes in 2010 that claimed 185 lives, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
Wednesday’s crash is the first major airliner accident in Pakistan since 2012 when a Bhoja Air Boeing 737-200 crashed in bad weather while on approach to Islamabad.