A passenger jet with 98 people on board crashed shortly after takeoff near Almaty airport in Kazakhstan on Friday, killing 12 people and injuring dozens.
The Bek Airplane, a Fokker 100, struck a concrete barrier and crashed into a two-story building, Kazakhstan’s Civil Aviation Committee said in a statement. All Bek Air flights and Fokker 100 aircraft operations in Kazakhstan were suspended pending an investigation.
The flight took off at 7:22 a.m. local time for Kazakhstan’s capital, Nur-Sultan. There was no fire at the crash site.
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev expressed condolences on Twitter to the victims’ families and friends, adding that a government commission was created to investigate the crash.
“All those guilty will be severely punished by the law,” he wrote.
Forty-nine people were hospitalized, 18 of them in critical condition, according to Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. Among the dead are the captain of the aircraft, Marat Muratabaev, and a Kazakh journalist, Dana Kruglova, of informburo.kz, the ministry said.
Police guard the Bek Air crash site near Kazakhstan’s Almaty International Airport as rescuers work Friday. (Vladimir Tretyakov/AP)
Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar said at a news conference that eight of the 12 deaths occurred at the scene. Sklyar said pilot error and technical malfunctions are considered preliminary causes of the crash, according to Russia’s Tass state news agency. The aircraft’s tail touched the runway twice as the flight took off, he said. Бек Эйр
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