The wreckage of an Afghan airliner that went missing with 104 people on board was found on Friday near the capital, Kabul, a day after it was turned away because of heavy snow, a Western security source said.

But NATO troops searching for the plane denied it had been found and said they were calling off their hunt for the day because of darkness and bad weather.

The security source said the Kam Air Boeing 737 was found to the northeast of the capital, but there was no word on casualties. "We don't know if there were any survivors," he said.

A US military spokesman said he could not confirm if the plane had been found, but spokesmen for a NATO-led peacekeeping force and the Afghan Defence Ministry said it had not.

"The crash site has not been definitely detected," said an Afghan Presidential Palace official on condition of anonymity. "A suspected site was seen, but the aircraft could not land there to confirm it because of poor weather."

The aircraft was flying from the western city of Herat to Kabul on Thursday when it went missing after being turned away from Kabul Airport.

If no survivors are found, it would be the worst crash in recent Afghan aviation history.

At least 14 of the 96 passengers were foreigners, the security source said. Nine of them were Turkish nationals working for Turkish companies in Afghanistan, the Turkish prime minister's office said. It said the Afghan Transport Ministry had confirmed the plane had crashed.

Italian naval Captain Bruno Vianini was on board the plane, Rome's Defence Ministry said. Italian Foreign Ministry sources said two other Italians might have been on the plane.

Three American women working for a Massachusetts-based company, Management Sciences for Health, were also on board, its Kabul representative William Schiffbauer said.

Six of the eight crew were also foreign, Kam Air deputy director Feda Mohammed Fedayi said. He initially said the six were from Kyrgyzstan, but later said he was not sure of their nationality.

Kam Air financial controller Zimarai Kamgar said the aircraft had contacted Peshawar Airport in northwestern Pakistan about an hour after it was turned away from Kabul at about 4.00 p.m. (1130 GMT) on Thursday.

But Deputy Interior Minister Shah Mahmoud Miakhel said the plane might not have had been able to fly as far as an airport in Pakistan. "It did not have so much fuel to enable it to fly far," he said.

Kam Air opened as Afghanistan's only private airline in November 2003. It flies leased aircraft between Kabul and Dubai and Istanbul and operates several domestic routes.

In September, an Antonov-24 operated by the airline slewed off the runway while landing in Kabul, slightly injuring some of the 27 passengers aboard, apparently after engine trouble.