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A player from Afghanistan’s youth soccer team was among those killed when he fell out of a plane trying to escape the country a day after the Taliban captured Kabul, the sports organization said Friday.
“It is with great sadness that we inform that Zaki Anwari, one of the players of the country’s national youth soccer team, passed away in a serious accident,” Afghanistan’s Directorate General of Sports and Physical Education said in a statement.
According to the government institution, Anwari, who was among hundreds of young people who wanted to leave the country, “died in an accident after falling from an American military plane.”
Dramatic scenes of hundreds of people trying to flee the country in any way they could begin to take place on Sunday, hours after the capital fell under Taliban control and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Afghanistan.
Thereafter thousands of people unleashed chaos at the airport trying to board repatriation flights, even though many of them had no documents, travel permits or tickets.
Videos posted on social media showed a C-17 US military aircraft with several bodies in the air, which witnesses said were people clinging to the outside of the plane before takeoff.
The U.S. Air Force confirmed last Tuesday the discovery of human remains in the wheel of one of its aircraft, while indicating that an investigation based on circulating videos is underway to determine what happened.
According to the American force, the aircraft arrived in Kabul to make a delivery of equipment and assistance for evacuations, but in the face of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Kabul and at the airport decided to make a quick take-off to leave the place.
On that day at least six people were killed in incidents inside the airport.
Another Afghan who died when he fell from the plane was Fida Muhammad, a 22-year-old dentist who lived in Kabul province.