A private plane from Germany with six people on board crashed in northern Iraq Friday, airport authorities in the Kurdish city of Sulaymanyah told Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa). Radio contact with the small aircraft broke off near the town of Halabja in the north-east of the country, the authorities said. The plane took off from Baku in Azerbaijan on Thursday and was heading for the city of Kirkuk in the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Police headquarters in Bavaria said Friday that there had been no trace since Thursday of a Cessna C501 aircraft which had taken off from Munich on the way to Kirkuk via Baku. The plane had left Munich Thursday, the police said, with three German businessmen, two German pilots and a Kurdish interpreter on board. Most of the German firms working in Iraq have projects in the north of the country which is relatively safe following the recent wave of kidnappings. The multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds claim as their own, is not so safe. The search for the plane that went down in a mountainous area would be difficult, security forces in Sulaymanyah said. The plane crashed in an inaccessible region which is currently under snow, the security forces said. --SP 23 08 Local Time 20 08 GMT
