At least 12 dead with scores in hospital after Kazakhstan aircraft crash
Video report by ITV News Correspondent Rebecca Barry
A Kazakhstan plane with 98 people aboard crashed soon after takeoff early on Friday morning, killing at least 12 people, officials in Almaty said.
At least 66 others survived with injuries, with 50 of them sent to hospital.
The Bek Air aircraft lost altitude soon after takeoff at 7:22am local time before crashing into a concrete fence and a two-storey building, the airport said.
In a statement on its Facebook page, the airport said there was no fire and a rescue operation got underway immediately following the crash.
Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister Roman Sklyar said the plane's tail hit the runway twice during takeoff, indicating that it struggled to get into the air.
One survivor said the plane started shaking less than two minutes after takeoff.
"It starts shaking like the whole body of the plane," Aslan Nazaraliyev said.
He added: "Lots of kids crying, woman shouting... the ceiling starts coming down it was like squeezing down and smashing everyone."
"At first the left wing jolted really hard, then the right. The plane continued to gain altitude, shaking quite severely, and then went down," he added.
Around 1,000 people were working at the snow-covered site of the crash. The weather in Almaty was clear, with mild sub-zero temperature that is common at this time of the year.
Footage showed the front of the broken-up fuselage which had rammed a house, and the rear of the plane which was lying in a field next to the airport.
The plane was flying to Nur-Sultan, the country’s capital formerly known as Astana.
The aircraft was identified as a Fokker-100, a medium-sized, twin-turbofan jet airliner.
The company manufacturing the aircraft went bankrupt in 1996 and the production of the Fokker-100 stopped the following year.
All Bek Air and Fokker-100 flights in Kazakhstan have been suspended pending the investigation of the crash, the country’s aviation authorities said.