On June 25, search and rescue teams were combing a forest in southern Cambodia, looking for a passenger aircraft with 22 people on board that crashed earlier in the day while flying between two popular tourist destinations.

The aircraft, a Russian-made AN-24, crashed in a mountainous jungle area, and rescuers were still searching for it nine hours after it disappeared.

It had been flying from Siem Reap - where the Angkor temple complex is located - to the coastal city of Sihanoukville, said Him Sarun of the Secretariat of Civil Aviation.

An official at Siem Reap airport said 13 of the passengers were from South Korea and three were Czech.

The aircraft carried a crew of five Cambodians and a Russian co-pilot.

It belonged to a small Cambodian airline, PMT Air, which began flying between Siem Reap and Sihanoukville in January.

An airport official said contact with the aircraft was lost at 10.50 am, five minutes before it was due to land.

Him Sarun said the crash site is thought to be between Kamchay and Bokor mountains in Kampot province, about 130 kilometers southwest of Phnom Penh.

Forestry workers on Bokor mountain "said they had spotted an aircraft crash" from a distance, said In Chiva, the Kampot province police chief.

But searchers were hampered by the remoteness of the area, darkness, and mud caused by recent rains, making trails impassable for vehicles.

Besides domestic operations, PMT flies two routes from South Korea to Cambodia - Seoul to Siem Reap and Busan to Siem Reap.

The airline is owned by Cambodian company Progress Multitrade.

South Korea had the highest number of tourists visiting Cambodia last year - some 221,000 were among 1.7 million foreign visitors.