Pakistan has located the wreckage of a Boeing cargo plane, the country’s airports authority said, adding that rescuers were searching for the five crew members on board when the aircraft went missing.

The plane was approaching Karachi from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates when radar showed it “rapidly descending” on Tuesday evening after reporting a “navigational system issue”, according to the Pakistan Airports Authority (PAA).

After a 12-hour search, Pakistan’s navy and maritime rescue agency “successfully located and identified wreckage of K2 Airways cargo B737 which was declared missing last night”, the PAA said in a statement posted on X.

The wreckage was found in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Ormara, a town on Pakistan’s southern coast, it said. “Efforts are under way to find the missing crew members,” the PAA added.

The authority published images of personnel lifting pieces of the fuselage from a small boat on to a larger vessel and the red and white debris with the words “K2 Air” laid out on the ship’s deck.

In a statement issued before the plane wreckage was found, the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, expressed “deep sorrow, grief and regret over the tragic incident in which a private cargo aircraft … crashed into the Arabian Sea and went missing”.

A source told AFP that navy and merchant vessels were taking part in the search efforts, supported by military aircraft.

The aircraft was observed on radar “rapidly descending and with rapid heading change” at 21:21pm on Tuesday and communication contact was lost about 155 nautical miles west of Karachi, the PAA said.

Preliminary data sent from the plane “indicated a loss of altitude, followed by a climb, and then a second, sudden and dramatic loss of altitude”, according to Flightradar24.com, a global flight-tracking service.

K2 Airways is a private cargo airline in Pakistan that operates scheduled and charter flights domestically and internationally. Manufactured in 1999, the aircraft flew as a passenger plane for Aeroflot and Garuda Indonesia before being converted to a cargo configuration in 2012, according to Airfleets.net.

Pakistan’s aviation sector has a chequered history with several deadly plane crashes in the past decade, including in the southern city of Karachi. The EU barred Pakistan’s national carrier from its airspace for four years over safety and licensing concerns, but lifted the ban in 2024.