ISLAMABAD, June 6: Pakistan’s accident rate regarding airplane crashes is probably the highest in the world but Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has never published the accident-related data.

On the other hand, it was being feared that since a criminal case had been registered against the owner of the Bhoja Airline, the insurance company might stop the payment of compensation to the relatives of the victims.

It was stated by Wing Commander (retired) Syed Naseem Ahmed, head of Society of Air Safety Investigators Pakistan along with Advocate Abdul Razzaq (PhD Criminology) and relatives of the victims of plane crash.

He said, “Unfortunately, Pakistan does not have the capacity to conduct inquiry into the technical faults in the plane due to which team of the Boeing Company came and gave a clean chit to the plane just like they did on the occasion of the Airblue plane crash.

“I have been a part of at least 20 airplane crash investigations and can say that it is not easy to detect fault in the planes after they crash, so an international expert who has experience of airline crashes should be called in to conduct such inquiries,” he said.

“At the moment Bhoja Air (operator), CAA Pakistan and Boeing Company have been given the best opportunity to protect their vested interest during investigations but there is no one to represent the public,” he regretted.

He further alleged that in the CAA, director generals (DGs) were appointed on political grounds and during the last 28 years, 18 DGs had been changed due to which system of the department was week and no one was willing to strengthen it.

“How is it possible that experts from Boeing Company in the absence of any technical experts from Pakistan will not hide their weaknesses? It has occurred, a number of times in the world. It happened in Indonesia during the crash investigation of SilkAir accident in 1997 (737-300).

“During investigation, Boeing Company managed to erase the last 10 seconds of flight data from FDR (black box) and the Indonesian authorities excluded the Boeing team from the investigations. Instead, they hired another team which found evidence of a rudder failure,” he explained.

Advocate Abdul Ghaffar said that registration of the criminal case against owner of the airline would delay the release of insurance money because company will wait for the result of criminal investigation.

“Interests of the victims’ relatives should be ensured as most of them could not get succession certificates from the courts.

According to rules Rs500, 000 should be paid to the family members of the victims immediately and after that Rs4.5 million should be paid from insurance company’s money,” he said.

Replying to questions of mediapersons Naseem Ahmed said in case the accident was caused by the pilot’s mistake (as was mentioned in the Airblue plane crash report) still the operator should be considered responsible because it had to be asked why incompetent crew was appointed and why the training of the staff was not ensured.

It is to mention her that Flight B4-213 of Bhoja Airline carrying 127 people had crashed on April 20 in Husainabad locality of Rawalpindi killing all on board.