Pakistani doctors scrambling to identify 127 plane crash victims

Pakistani doctors and paramedics were Saturday scrambling to identify the remains of 127 victims of a plane crash near the capital, officials said. The Bhoja Airlines flight from Karachi to Islamabad went down Friday about 15 kilometres short of the airport, killing all the passengers and crew. Mehmod Jamal, executive director of Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, said they had received body parts collected in 140 bags from the site of the accident. "No single body was found in one piece but we have completed postmortems of 120 bags and 70 bodies have been identified, out of which 54 were handed over to relatives," Jamal said. Rescuers worked throughout the night to recover the remains. "The rescue work has been almost completed and most of the limbs of victims have been collected from the scene," Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Mubarik Shah said. He also said the airplane's flight recorders had been recovered. Interior Minister Rehman Malik said it was possible that lightning had struck the plane during a storm and the wings of plane had caught fire before the crash.