The two people initially unaccounted for in a Russian plane crash over the weekend in the mountainous northeast of Afghanistan died in the accident, an Afghan government official said Monday. The Falcon 10 business jet was believed to be carrying six people on a hospital flight from India to Uzbekistan and Russia before communication was lost on Saturday evening. Four people survived, and two were initially reported as unaccounted for by air transport agency Rosaviatsia. “Of the six people on board the aircraft, tentatively, four are alive. They have various injuries. The fate of two people is being clarified,” Rosaviatsia had said Sunday, citing the Russian embassy in Afghanistan. But an Afghan official at the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation later said that the two other passengers had died in the accident. “We did a search for two days and yesterday evening we found the location of the plane. It had six crew members. We rescued the four that were alive. Two people died,” Abdul Sattar Gharwal, the director general of the ministry, said. The four survivors were taken to Kabul. The RIA Novosti news agency said two of the plane’s passengers were Russians, one who was seriously ill, and the other her husband who had paid for the flight. The two-engine plane was built by France’s Dassault in 1978 and owned by a company called Athletic Group and a private individual. A provincial government official in Afghanistan told AFP the aircraft came down in Badakhshan province, which borders China, Tajikistan and Pakistan. The area of the crash is eight hours by road from the provincial capital Faizabad, said Zabihullah Amiri, head of the provincial information department. Russian investigators have announced the opening of a probe into the cause of the crash. The mighty Hindu Kush mountain range cuts through the province, which is home to Afghanistan’s highest peak, Mount Noshaq, at 7,492 metres (24,580 feet) tall.