Zia's close confidant CJCSC Akhtar Abdur Rahman, 8th Director-General of the ISPR Siddique Salik, American diplomat Arnold Lewis Raphel and 26 others also died upon impact.Policies Chief of the Army Staff President of Pakistan

At 15:51 (PKT) Bahawalpur control tower lost contact, and the plane plunged from the sky and struck the ground with such force that it was blown to pieces and wreckage scattered over a wide area.

Witnesses cited in Pakistan's official investigation said that the C-130 began to pitch "in an up-and-down motion" while flying low shortly after takeoff before going into a "near-vertical dive", exploding on impact, killing all on board.

[2] Washington sent a team of United States Air Force officers to assist the Pakistanis in the investigation, but the two sides reached sharply different conclusions, leading to distrust as well as many arguments and fights.

[5] Some weeks after the crash, a 27-page summary of a secret 365-page report was released by Pakistani investigators in which they said that they had found evidence of possible problems with the aircraft's elevator booster package, as well as frayed or snapped control cables.

[4] The report concluded that the contamination of the elevator booster package might at worst have caused sluggish controls leading to overcontrol but not to an accident.

Hanif "made phone calls and researched the lives of those around Zia", attempting to assess possible perpetrators—"the C.I.A., the Israelis, the Indians, the Soviets, rivals inside the Army".

According to Barbara Crossette, The New York Times' South Asia bureau chief from 1988 to 1991: Of all the violent political deaths in the twentieth century, none with such great interest to the U.S. has been more clouded than the mysterious air crash that killed president (and Army Chief General) Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan in (August) 1988, a tragedy that also claimed the life of the serving American ambassador and most of Zia's top commanders.

[7] Stoking the suspicion that the Soviets were involved in the plane crash, one of the fatalities was General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and former head of the nation's spy agency, Inter Service Intelligence (ISI); Abdur Rehman was a leader of the Afghan mujahedin's war against the Soviets.

[4][8][9] Hamid Gul, the Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence, told The Times that Zia was killed in a conspiracy involving a "foreign power".

[4] Early reports suggested that Raphel had only been summoned to join the flight at the last minute, which fueled conspiracy theories blaming the United States.

[7] Writing in the Fall 2005 issue of World Policy Journal, former U.S. ambassador to India John Gunther Dean, blamed Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, for orchestrating Zia's assassination in retaliation for Pakistan developing a nuclear weapon to counteract India, and to prevent Zia, an effective Muslim leader, from continuing to influence U.S. foreign policy.

[3] The Government of Pakistan announced to hold the state funeral given the Zia-ul-Haq who was buried with military honors in a specially crafted white marble tomb, adjacent to Shah Faisal Mosque in Islamabad.