Chenari, Afghanistan ? NATO helicopter gunships found the shattered wreckage of a missing Afghan airliner Saturday on a frigid mountain east of the capital, and officials said they thought none of the 104 people aboard could have survived the crash.

Six Americans were believed to have been on board, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said, double the number previously reported.

Afghan police struggled through deep snow to within sight of the scattered debris, but they reported no sign of life and were forced back by darkness and plummeting temperatures.

“So far we don’t think there are any survivors,” said Lutfullah Mashal, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Interior. “The plane is completely destroyed.”

The Boeing 737-200, flown by Kam-Air, post-Taliban Afghanistan’s first private airline, vanished from radar screens Thursday afternoon as it approached Kabul airport in a snowstorm, sparking a massive search operation for the 96 passengers and eight crew, at least 24 of them foreigners.

If all are confirmed dead, it would be this war-wracked nation’s deadliest air disaster.

Officials said there was no indication that the scheduled flight, which was arriving from the western Afghan city of Herat, was hijacked or brought down by a bomb.

Afghan transport minister Enayatullah Qasemi said the cause of the crash remained a mystery and that U.S. Department of Transportation experts as well as representatives of the foreign victims would help investigate.

NATO said two of its Dutch Apache helicopters spotted the tail of the plane Saturday afternoon, lying at an altitude of 11,000 feet on the side of Chaperi Mountain, 20 miles east of Kabul.

Afghan police officers inspect the area where a NATO helicopter spotted the wreckage of a missing Afghan plane in the mountains east of Kabul, Afghanistan. The helicopters found the wreckage Saturday in the forbidding mountains, and officials said all 104 people aboard appeared to have been killed.

Helicopters then dropped a Slovenian mountain rescue team to the scene, but Qasemi said no one reached the wreckage before nightfall.

“Tomorrow, we plan to use helicopters to quickly start recovering the bodies,” the minister said at a news conference. “It’s not an easy job, and it will take time.”

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The passengers included Carmen Urdaneta, 32, of Brookline, Mass., a Kansas University graduate who grew up in Topeka. She worked for Management Sciences for Health.