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A Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane with around 100 people on board has crashed in a residential area in the country’s largest city of Karachi, an airline spokesman has said. Local reports said the state-run airline’s Airbus A320 was traveling from Pakistan’s capital Lahore. It is feared there may be more casualties as the plane came down on houses in the Model Colony area in the city.
A Pakistani court has commuted the death sentence of a British-born man convicted of the 2002 kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and acquitted three co-accused. At least four people were convicted in connection with Pearl’s murder, including Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh who was sentenced to death in 2002 for masterminding the killing. He has been in jail for 18 years awaiting the outcome of an appeal.
At least 10 people were killed and dozens injured when a suicide bomber detonated his device near a police vehicle in southwestern Pakistan. The attacker tried to enter a Sunni religious rally near a press club in the city of Quetta, and blew himself up as police tried to stop him. Two officers are among the dead, said the city’s police chief Abdul Razzaq Cheema. At least 30 are injured.
At least 71 people have been killed and dozens more injured in northeast Pakistan after a series of avalanches destroyed and buried houses on Tuesday. The avalanches were triggered by heavy snowfall in the Neelum Valley, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, according to local authorities.
Dozens of houses had been wrecked and buried by the snow, with most of those killed and injured in their homes when the avalanches hit.
General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former military leader, has been sentenced to death at a special court hearing in Islamabad. The three-member court sentenced him over a high treason charge that has been pending since 2013. Gen Musharraf seized power in a military coup in 1999 and served as the country’s president from 2001 to 2008. He is currently in Dubai after being allowed to leave the country for medical treatment in 2016.
A massive fire spread through multiple train cars on a train traveling Thursday in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, killing more than 70 people, in the latest tragedy to hit the country’s dilapidated rail system. Officials said the fire was sparked by a cooking gas stove that exploded as breakfast was being prepared on board. It reportedly took at least 20 minutes for the train to stop after the fire broke out.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, has said he has been trying to raise the alarm at the United Nations this week about the danger of a nuclear war breaking out over Kashmir. India and Pakistan came close to a conflict in February when India bombed Pakistani territory for the first time in a half century and warplanes from both countries fought a dogfight over the divided region.
At least 25 people have been confirmed dead and more than 300 injured when a magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit Pakistan-administered Kashmir and areas in Punjab province. Tuesday’s quake hit 22km (14 miles) north of the city of Jhelum along the boundary separating the agricultural heartland of Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the US geological agency, USGS, said.
Gunmen have stormed a five-star hotel in Pakistan’s port city of Gwadar, killing at least five people, officials said. The military said four hotel employees and a Pakistan Navy soldier were killed. According to the military, all guests at the hotel, which has 114 rooms, were safely evacuated. The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), an ethnic Baloch separatist group fighting for independence for Balochistan province, claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that four fighters were involved.
British Airways will resume flights to Pakistan ten years after a deadly terror attack at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. The airline stopped Pakistan flights after 54 people including 6 British citizens were killed in the September 2008 attack. British Airways will become the only Western airline to service Pakistan beginning on June 2, 2019.