More Than a Dozen Killed in Plane Crash in Kazakhstan

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MOSCOW — At least 14 people were killed when a Bek Air plane crashed into a building shortly after departing from Almaty International Airport in Kazakhstan on Friday.

Some of the passengers survived, airport officials said in a statement. There were 95 passengers and five crew members on board. At least six children were among the dead, according to a spokesman for Kazakhstan’s Interior Ministry, Nursultan Nurakhmetov, the Interfax news agency reported.

At 7:22 a.m., the plane, a Fokker 100, bound for Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital, lost altitude and crashed into a two-story building, officials said. The crash took place in a residential area near the airport, Mr. Nurakhmetov said. Airport officials said 14 people were killed and another five were in the hospital in critical condition.

The cause was not immediately known. Photographs carried by Kazakh news outlets showed the fuselage of the passenger jet ripped to pieces in the snow amid the rubble of a building. Rescue workers combed the wreckage. In one photo, emergency workers are seen picking through the debris — a red suitcase, a building’s window frame, and pieces of the aircraft.

“Where is the ambulance?” a woman can be heard saying on a video from the scene circulated by Kazakh media. “People are asking for an ambulance and it’s not arriving.”

Almaty, in southeastern Kazakhstan near the mountainous border with Kyrgyzstan, is the Central Asian country’s biggest city.

Kazakh authorities have halted flights of the Dutch-made Fokker 100, news agencies reported, citing the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development. Bek Air, which bills itself as Kazakhstan’s first low-cost airline, operates seven Fokker 100 jets and flies to 12 Kazakh destinations as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The airline did not immediately comment after the crash, and its Twitter and Facebook accounts appeared to have been taken offline.

On Twitter, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan expressed his condolences to the victims and said a government commission headed by the country’s prime minister, Askar Mamin, would investigate the crash.

“All the guilty will be punished severely in accordance with the law,” Mr. Tokayev said.

Kazakhstan’s Interior Ministry said 976 people, 70 pieces of equipment, and 33 ambulance brigades were involved in rescue efforts that were ongoing several hours after the crash, Interfax reported.

The first emergency call arrived at 7:43 a.m. local time, or 21 minutes after the crash, according to a timeline provided by airport officials. The airport released the names of 60 people known to have survived the crash.

Production on the Fokker 100 ceased in 1997, after its Dutch maker went into bankruptcy in 1996. Though many airlines have retired the aircraft, more than 100 are still active, mostly in Australia and Iran.

The plane measures about 39 yards long, and has a passenger capacity of 109 people.

Daniel Victor contributed reporting from Hong Kong.





Source : Nytimes