RAWALPINDI, April 12: A Pakistan Air Force (PAF) transport aircraft and a VIP chopper aborted their missions for Chitral on Thursday after a rocket was fired on one of them near Dir, sources told Dawn.

The PAF C-130 aircraft was taking relief goods to Chitral from the Chaklala airbase when the pilot noticed a rocket missing it while flying over Dir. The pilot aborted the relief mission and returned back to Islamabad after about an hour, the source said.

The PAF Director General Public Relations, air-commodore Sarfraz Ahmed, confirmed the incident but did not give any specific reason for the aborted mission. "We are finding out the details," Mr Sarfraz said.

The VIP chopper belonging to the Agha Khan Foundation was directed by the Air Traffic Control Chitral to return to Islamabad airport as a precautionary measure, a source said. The helicopter with three crew members and two other people aboard flew from Islamabad at around 8:30 am and returned only after 60 minutes of flight, the source added.

The source said that at about the same time a PIA commercial flight had taken off from Chitral for Peshawar at 7:30 am but another PIA flight scheduled to take off at 10 am was cancelled due to bad weather. A PIA spokesman Muhammad Latif confirmed that one of the two scheduled flights for Peshawar had landed safely while the other was cancelled due to weather problems.