In the evening of 20 January, a Falcon 10 aircraft, while in the airspace near the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, stopped communicating and disappeared from radar screens.
Officials of Afghanistan's Taliban-led government announced that the plane crashed on the morning of January 21 in Badakhshan Province and that a search team had been sent to the region bordering China, Tajikistan, and Pakistan.
There were six people on board the aircraft: four crew members and two passengers. The aircraft was on a chartered sanitary flight from Gaya (India) – Tashkent – Zhukovsky. The original departure point of the aircraft was Thailand’s Utapao airport.
The Afghan Islamic Press news agency quoted Zabihullah Amiri, head of the provincial information department, as saying the plane went down between the Karan wan Munjan and Zebak districts of Badakhshan Province.
"The plane has crashed but the [exact] location is not known yet," the French news agency AFP quoted Amiri as saying. "We were informed by local people in the morning."
The aircraft with current Russian registration RA-09011, serial number 128, is owned by Athletic Group LLC and a private individual. Previously the aircraft had the following registration numbers: CN-TKN, P4-AVN, N228SJ, N175BC.
Afghanistan's Bakhtar News Agency reported that security forces had reached the crash site, but no details were provided.
There were varying reports of the plane's origin, with Russian aviation authorities saying it was a Russian-registered charter ambulance traveling from India via Uzbekistan to Moscow.
The Russian Federal Agency for Air Transport reported on Telegram that "according to preliminary data, six people were aboard the aircraft, including four crew members and two passengers."
The agency said the flight had departed the Indian city of Gaya and was flying to Tashkent and then on to Moscow.The Russian state news agency TASS reported that two Russian citizens were on the flight.
Indian aviation authorities said on January 21 that the plane was a "Moroccan-registered small aircraft" and was "neither an Indian scheduled aircraft nor a non-scheduled charter aircraft," as misinformation spreaded earlier.
