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Afghan minister dies in plane crash
KARACHI, Pakistan (CNN) -- A chartered small aircraft carrying Afghanistan's Mines and Industries Minister and seven others has crashed in the Arabian Sea off Pakistan killing all on board, officials say. According to Pakistan's Information Minister Sheik Rashid, Juma Mohammad Mohammadi was traveling with four other Afghan officials, a Chinese businessman and two Pakistanis, including the pilot, when the plane crashed shortly after take-off about 56 km (35 miles) west of Karachi. Pakistani naval officials said four bodies have been recovered from the waters of the Arabian Sea. The Cessna 402 airplane took off from Karachi around 8:10 a.m. local time and was headed for Juzzak in western Pakistan. According to Star Air Aviation, the charter company, the plane disappeared from Karachi radar at 9:05 a.m. Pipeline plansMohammadi traveled to Pakistan last week on government business, Mines and Industries Ministry officials in Kabul said. He had been attending a meeting of the "Fourth Steering Committee", an international group planning the construction of a $2.5 billion transnational pipeline, to pump gas and oil from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan into Pakistan and possibly even into India. The World Bank has been contributing to a feasibility study for the pipeline, first mooted in the mid-1990s under the Taliban regime. During much of Afghanistan's 23-year conflict, Mohammadi lived in the United States and is a former World Bank official. Construction of the transnational pipeline is seen as a key plank in the reconstruction of the Afghan economy. Afghanistan would charge Turkmenistan royalty fees for transporting its gas and also feed in gas of its own from small fields in the north as they were further developed. -- CNN Producer Syed Mohsin Naqvi and correspondent Karl Penhaul contributed to this report.
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