ANKARA, Feb 4 (AFP) - Nine Turkish citizens were aboard an Afghan passenger jet which crashed near Kabul after vanishing from radar screens in a snow storm, the Turkish prime minister's press office said in a statement Friday.
The Turkish passengers aboard the Boeing 737 travelling from the western city of Herat to the capital were civilians working for Turkish firms, the statement added.
Six of them were employees of a joint venture between Turkey's Gulsan and Cukurova groups, which won a new contract in Herat after constructing a highway between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, the group said in a statement.
They included three engineers -- Ahmet Hamdi Saral, 40, Erkan Helvacioglu, 24, and Ayhan Birci, 39 -- and three workers -- Mustafa Kemal Dundar, 27, Mustafa Firat, 39, and Mehmet Korkmaz, 40 -- it said.
One of the Afghan passengers aboard the aircraft -- Ahmet Babur, 27 -- was also an employee of Gulsan-Cukurova, it said, but gave no other details.
The remaining three Turks -- Hakan Ozkaya, Yuksel Oksuz and Abdulkadir Camuroglu -- were employees of three other private Turkish companies, the prime minister's press office said.
The semi-official Anatolia news agency had earlier reported that there were six Turkish construction workers on the aircraft.
Several Turkish firms are operating in Afghanistan in joint ventures with US firms to help out with the war-torn country's reconstruction, and are especially involved in the construction of highways in Kabul and Herat.
There were a total of 96 passengers and eight crew on the aircraft, operated by Afghanistan's first privately run airline, Kam Air, which went missing late Thursday afternoon.
The wreckage of the plane was found Friday east of Kabul. It was not clear whether there were any survivors.
02/04/2005 14:24 GMT - AFP