An Indonesian air force transport plane crashed Tuesday into a residential area of a major city shortly after take-off, exploding in a fireball and killing at least 20 people.
Buildings near the crash zone were severely damaged and cars were reduced to flaming wrecks when the Hercules C-130 with 12 crew members on board came down in Medan, a city of two million on the island of Sumatra.
A major rescue operation swung into action, with ambulances ferrying bodies from the accident site, and crowds of anxious residents gathering around a police cordon to get a look.
Novi, who works at an international school near the accident site and goes by one name, said she heard the aircraft and from her office window saw it flying very low before it crashed.
“It was very scary,” she told AFP, adding she rushed to the site with her colleagues but the wreckage and plumes of smoke looked “very bad”.
Another local resident Januar, 26, said the aircraft appeared to be in trouble just before the accident.
“I saw the plane from the direction of the airport and it was tilting already, then I saw smoke billowing.”
A hospital in Medan said 20 bodies had so far been brought in. It was not immediately clear how many were of those recovered had been on the plane and how many were people on the ground.
“Twenty bodies have arrived at the hospital’s morgue,” Sairi Saragih, spokeswoman for the Adam Malik hospital, told AFP.
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