(Updates with no survivors)
KABUL, July 6 (Reuters) - An Azeri cargo plane chartered by foreign troops in Afghanistan crashed north of Kabul early on Wednesday, killing all nine crew members on board, officials said.
"On July 6, at 0010 Kabul time, an Il-76 cargo plane belonging to Silk Way Airlines and heading from Baku to Bagram, crashed 25 kilometres from Kabul," Azeri state air company AZAL said in a statement.
"According to preliminary information, the crash may have been the result of a collision with an unknown object."
Abdul Haleem, the district governor of Siagerd in Parwan province where the plane crashed, said a rescue team had recovered the remains of eight crew members, adding it was impossible for the ninth person to have survived.
"There was a big explosion when the aircraft hit the mountains late last night," Haleem said. He said all the crew members were Russian.
Bagram is located around 45 km (28 miles) north of the Afghan capital and is home to the largest U.S. air base in the country.
AZAL said the plane was carrying 18 tonnes of cargo and had nine crew members on board. It did not give any more details on the nature of the cargo. An AZAL official declined comment.
Abdul Baseer Salangi, the provincial governor of Parwan, where Bagram is located, said the cargo plane was chartered by foreign troops and had crashed in a mountainous area of Siagerd district.
The plane did not belong to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, a spokesman for the force said.
Silk Way Airlines is a cargo airline based in Baku and the Ilyushin (IL-76) aircraft is a large Russian-made freighter able to transport outsized and heavy cargo.
Azerbaijan is part of what the United States refers to as the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) supplying military operations in Afghanistan, and which involves Russia, Latvia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
In October, a civilian cargo transport plane crashed into mountains near the Afghan capital Kabul, killing eight people on board -- six Filipinos, one Indian national and a Kenyan. (Reporting by Hamid Shalizi and Michelle Nichols in Kabul and Lada Yevgrashina in Baku; Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by Sugita Katyal)
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