Heavy snow causes death and havoc

Following heavy snow in Tajikistan, a house collapsed on Thursday in the Nurobod district of central Rasht Valley, killing nine people and seriously injuring three more, Sirojiddin Mulloev, a spokesman for the Tajik emergency ministry, told IRIN from the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, a day later. "There have been avalanches in other areas, particularly in the Obigarm-Nurobod area [in central Tajikistan] - some 200 vehicles have been trapped from both sides of the road and they cannot move," Mulloev added. According to the emergency ministry, the recent spate of avalanches had been caused by heavy snow in most areas of the country. "Some elderly say that they have not seen such snow since 1969," the emergency official said. An Afghan passenger jet with 104 people on board disappeared from radar during a snowstorm and authorities on Friday launched a search and rescue operation. The Kam Air Boeing 737 took off on Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat bound for the capital but was unable to land due to heavy snow, according to Feda Mohammed Fedayi, the airline's deputy director. Fedayi said the plane had been diverted to the airport in the Pakistan border city of Peshawar, but that as of Friday morning the company had had no word on whether it had landed safely. Pakistani aviation officials have been quoted as saying the plane never entered their airspace. The area between Kabul and the Pakistan border is dominated by high, rugged mountains, making the flight hazardous in bad weather and any rescue attempt difficult and dangerous. In Kazakhstan, emergency officials warned on Friday of avalanche danger in the south of the country. The threat of avalanche remains in mountainous parts of Zhambyl, in southern Kazakhstan and Almaty provinces, the Kazakh ministry of emergencies said. According to meteorologists, the threat of avalanches is due to heavy precipitation over the past few days, with mountain slopes being overburdened with fresh snow. In Kyrgyzstan, a passenger bus has gone missing in southern Jalalabad province since Tuesday with some 11 people on board due to the bad weather, the Kyrgyz emergency ministry reported on Friday. "Rescue teams are working on the ground to find out what happened to them," Emil Akmatov, a spokesman for the Kyrgyz emergency agency, told IRIN. An avalanche killed a man in the southern province of Osh on Wednesday, he added. The Central Asian region is prone to a number of natural disasters, including earthquakes, landslides, floods, avalanches and drought, with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan being the most vulnerable countries. A report by the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) suggested that natural disasters had killed about 2,500 people and affected some 5.5 million (almost 10 percent of the total population) in Central Asia over the past decade.