We studied dust acoustic solitary waves (DASW) in a five component cometary plasma by deriving the Kadomstev–Petiashvili (KP) equation. The five components consist of two components of electrons described by kappa distributions with different temperatures and spectral indices, a lighter (hydrogen) and a heavier (oxygen) ion component, both ion components are described by Maxwellian distributions. Dust particles, with varying charge, constitute the fifth component. The system supports rarefactive DASWs whose amplitudes are larger when the charges on the dust particles vary. The amplitudes also increase with increasing $$ z_{d0} n_{d0} $$ (product of equilibrium charge number and density of dust) and increasing ion densities. It, however, decreases with increasing spectral indices of the electrons.