In brief: Nepal plane wreckage found with 18 dead

KATMANDU, Nepal – Rescuers in Nepal today found the wreckage of a passenger plane that crashed into the side of a snow-covered mountain and burst into flames, killing all 18 people on board, including a small child, authorities said.

Moving slowly on foot through thick snow, rescuers pulled 17 bodies from the crash site, police official Bam Bahadur Bhandari said.

A helicopter was able to spot the wreckage on a mountainside near Machinelek, about 160 miles west of the capital, Katmandu, a day after the Nepal Airlines Twin Otter lost contact in bad weather.

The plane was flying from Katmandu to Jumla, about 250 miles to the west, when it made an unscheduled fuel stop in the city of Pokhara, about a third of the way into the journey. Visibility was poor because of the snow, rain and fog, Bhandari said.

Bhandari said the remote area was covered by snow and it took rescuers several hours to reach there by foot from the nearest town 8 miles away.

The Canada-manufactured de Havilland aircraft had 15 passengers and three crew members on board. One passenger was believed to be a Danish national, while the rest on board, including an infant, were Nepalese. The plane was 43 years old.

Bombing derails train, killing eight

KARACHI, Pakistan – A bomb placed by an ethnic separatist group derailed a train in southwest Pakistan on Sunday, killing eight people, police and the militants said.

Three of the dead were children and another 20 people were wounded by the blast in Kashmor district, which caused several train cars to run off the track, police official Mohammad Azeem said.

Kashmor is in Sindh province but adjoins insurgency-hit Baluchistan. One of several ethnic Baluch separatist groups operating in the resource-rich province, the Baluch Republican Army, claimed responsibility. Al-Qaida-linked militants also have a presence there.

The group’s spokesman, Sarbaz Baluch, said the attack was a reaction to what he alleged were killings in Baluchistan’s Dera Bugti region by Pakistani paramilitaries.

The group also blew up three gas pipelines last week, suspending supplies to millions of household for two days.

Meanwhile, a roadside bomb killed a policeman guarding a polio vaccination drive team in the outskirts of northwestern city of Peshawar.

Police official Ibrahim Khan said another officer was wounded in the attack during the weekly anti-polio campaign in the Budhni area.