At Least 9 Killed in Plane Crash in Kazakhstan

The airline said 100 people were on board and that some had survived.

A plane with 95 passengers and five crew members on board crashed near Almaty on Friday. The Bek Air aircraft went down shortly after takeoff.Credit...Emergency Situations Ministry of the Republic of Kazakhstan

INDIA— At least nine people were killed when a Bek Air plane crashed into a building shortly after departing from Almaty International Airport in Kazakhstan on Friday.airline, Almaty International Airport in Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, Plane Crash, Plane Crash in Kazakhstan, plane crash kazakhstan, 

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

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.

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The cause was not immediately known. Photographs carried by Kazakh news outlets showed the fuselage of the passenger jet ripped to pieces amid the rubble of a building.

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

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Kazakh authorities have halted flights of the Dutch-made Fokker 100, news agencies reported, citing the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development.

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.

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.