India’s civil aviation ministry on Sunday had to step in to quell speculative reports about an aircraft that crashed in Aghanistan’s Badakhshan province on Saturday night being an Indian carrier.

The chartered plane was carrying six people and disappeared from the radar screens over Afghanistan on Sunday, according to a Reuters report. Two Taliban officials in Badakhshan said on Sunday that two passengers were killed in a plane crash, but four others had survived.

Khan Mohammad, head of the provincial governor’s office, said the four surviving passengers were now with Taliban administration representatives. Zabihullah Amiri, Badakhshan’s provincial spokesman, confirmed the death toll and that four had survived.

Since the aircraft had taken off from Gaya in Bihar after refuelling, most reports initially suggested that this was an Indian carrier.

Amid conflicting reports about the ownership of the aircraft, the civil aviation ministry in its first statement clarified that “the unfortunate plane crash that has just occurred in Afghanistan is neither an Indian Scheduled Aircraft nor a Non-Scheduled (NSOP)/Charter aircraft. It is a Moroccan-registered small aircraft. More details are awaited”.

Later, the ministry said the DF-10 (Dassault Falcon) aircraft was registered in Morocco and was serving as an air ambulance. It was flying from Thailand to Moscow and had refuelled at Gaya airport.

An official told PTI that the plane departed the Gaya airport after refuelling at 4.02pm on Saturday. There were six passengers onboard, including a female patient, the official added.

The Russian news agency TASS had initially reported that an Indian jet flying to Moscow had crashed in Afghanistan’s northeast, quoting the Aamaj News agency. It was apparently transporting a Russian citizen who needed hospitalisation from Pattaya to Moscow.

A manifest list for the plane, which named everyone on board and which was published by the SHOT news outlet appeared to show that the crew were Russian nationals too.

According to Reuters, the Taliban-run Afghan aviation ministry said in a statement on X that the plane’s planned route did not include passing through Afghanistan’s air space and that “probably due to technical issues” the plane had diverted from its planned route.

The statement said a ministry technical team was investigating the matter. “Afghanistan police had received reports of a plane crash in a remote, mountainous region of Badakhshan,” a provincial police spokesperson said on Sunday.