SHORTLY before 11am BST on Saturday the pilot of the RAF Nimrod MR2 surveillance aircraft told ground control that he was facing a serious technical malfunction.

According to reports last night, air traffic controllers received several mayday calls before the plane crashed.

It was on its descent to Kandahar air base when it crashed 12 miles west of its destination.

It is believed that fire warning detectors went off in the aircraft as flames spread through the fuselage and disabled the controls. What followed happened very rapidly, according to a military source.

A massive short circuit in the hundreds of feet of wiring inside the aircraft caused a spark and smoke engulfed the work stations of the 14 men on board. The source said: “There was a message reporting a serious technical problem shortly before the catastrophic event happened.”

The disaster that befell the Nimrod, flying at 20,000ft (6,100m) above the terrain of southern Kandahar province in the south of Afghanistan, killed 14 highly experienced specialists, men who will be hard to replace, and devastated the community of RAF Kinloss on the Moray Firth in north Scotland, which was home to 12 of the dead. A board of inquiry has been set up into the worst casualty toll from a single incident suffered by the Armed Forces since the Falklands conflict in 1982, when 18 SAS troopers died in a helicopter crash.

The Ministry of Defence was sufficiently confident yesterday of the cause of the Nimrod crash to rule out any enemy involvement. But the Taleban quickly claimed to have shot down the aircraft with a shoulder-launched Stinger missile, one of the American weapons that was left over from the days when the CIA was supplying such systems to the Mujahidin to fight Soviet occupying forces.

However, the versions of the Stinger that were sent covertly to Afghanistan are 20 years old and have a maximum range of 11,000ft. Even if the surviving Stingers were in operational use, which seems doubtful, they would not have been able to reach a Nimrod MR2 whose normal operating altitude would be about 20,000ft.

A military source in Kabul said: “Everyone in Kandahar would have witnessed the Nimrod on fire and coming down, so the Taleban just grabbed their opportunity to claim responsibility. But the first calls said they had shot down a helicopter, so they clearly didn’t have a clue what was involved.”

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, dismissed as propaganda claims that the Taleban had shot down the Nimrod. He said it had been a terrible accident.

The Nimrod MR2, which used to have a straightforward antisubmarine warfare role, and is known as “the Mighty Hunter”, has been adapted to take on other surveillance functions, and on Saturday the doomed aircraft was providing crucial intelligence on Taleban concentrations in the district of Panjwayi, about 20 miles west of the city of Kandahar.

The four-engined aircraft, with its 14 crew — 12 RAF, one Royal Marine and one Army — has the ability to eavesdrop on enemy radio signals.

Beneath them, as the crew monitored their computer screens, Canadian-led Nato troops from the International Security Assistance Force were engaged in one of the biggest battles with the Taleban since Nato took over responsibility for security in southern Afghanistan from the Americans on August 1. The objective of Operation Medusa was to clear out the Taleban from the Panjwayi district. Nato reported yesterday that 200 Taleban had been killed, and that four Canadian soldiers had also died.

Yesterday, at the scene of the Nimrod crash, investigators retrieved vital parts of the wreckage to help in an inquiry into its cause. The bodies of the 14 men have already been recovered and will be repatriated.

The new head of the British Army has said that his soldiers in Afghanistan are fighting at the limit of their capacity, adding that they were “meeting challenges on the hoof”. Sir Richard Dannatt, who took over as Chief of the General Staff from Sir Mike Jackson last week, said: “We are running hot, certainly running hot. Can we cope? I pause. I say ‘just’.”

General Dannatt said his forces would be in the country for the “long term” adding, however, that they were not fighting the “fourth Afghan war” — a reference to past military disasters in the country — and were in Afghanistan at the invitation of President Karzai. In an interview conducted before the crash and published in today’s Guardian, General Dannatt refused to set a schedule for the withdrawal of the 7,200 British troops in Afghanistan.

The 14 victims were:

Flight Lieutenant Steven Johnson

Flight Lieutenant Leigh Anthony Mitchelmore

Flight Lieutenant Gareth Rodney Nicholas

Flight Lieutenant Allan James Squires

Flight Lieutenant Steven Swarbrick

Flight Sergeant Gary Wayne Andrews

Flight Sergeant Stephen Beattie

Flight Sergeant Gerard Martin Bell

Flight Sergeant Adrian Davies

Sergeant Benjamin James Knight

Sergeant John Joseph Langton

Sergeant Gary Paul Quilliam

Lance Corporal Oliver Simon Dicketts

Royal Marine Joseph David Windall

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