Nepal plane crash: Death toll 49; 22 people manage to escape

At least 49 people were killed on Monday when a Bangladeshi airliner crashed in cloudy weather as it came in to land at the Nepalese capital’s hill-ringed airport, officials said.

The chief executive officer of US-Bangla Airlines, Imran Asif, accused Kathmandu’s air traffic control for giving wrong signals.

But airport general manager Raj Kumar Chettri said the pilot disregarded their messages and came in from the wrong direction.

Deeply anguished by the loss of lives due to the plane crash in Kathmandu. My thoughts are with the families of the deceased and I pray that those injured recover at the earliest.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 12, 2018

Seventy-one people were on board the plane arriving from Dhaka when it clipped the fence at Kathmandu and burst into flames, Chettri said.

There were 33 Nepali passengers, 32 from Bangladesh, one from China and one from the Maldives.

“All of a sudden the plane shook violently and there was a loud bang,” one of the survivors, Basanta Bohora, told the Kathmandu Post daily. “I was seated near a window and was able to break out of the window.”

The accident was the latest to hit mountainous Nepal, which has a poor record of air …read more