Plane crashes into African marketplace

(CNN) -- A plane crashed Tuesday shortly after taking off from the Goma airport in the Democratic Republic of Congo, tearing the roofs off houses as it plowed through a densely populated marketplace near the runway.

Antoine Ghonda, a Congolese lawmaker and former foreign minister, said the crash killed at least 18 people while roughly 66 others -- including five crew members -- survived. Those numbers from Ghonda, who is in touch with Congolese Interior Ministry officials, are down sharply from earlier estimates that as many as 75 were dead.

It was unclear whether those estimates included people on the ground.

"I can see shops that have been just completely destroyed," said Anna Ridout of relief agency World Vision, who arrived at the scene from her nearby office moments after the crash. "This was a market area where women were selling their goods. ... People were talking of people just being plowed over by the plane moving across the ground and through the shops and through wooden houses."

Ridout said the plane was "complete rubble" from the cockpit to windows beside the fifth row of seats. She said she expects casualties will be reported from the plane and among those at what she called a very busy market.

"I saw a lot of bodies being carried on stretchers," she said. "Also, we have photographs of figures who are unrecognizable in the wreckage. I would expect that, now that they're clearing the wreckage, that by tomorrow that number [of deaths] will rise."

Among the passengers who survived were members of an American missionary family from southeastern Minnesota -- Barry and Marybeth Mosier, and their children April and Andrew.

"It was horrible, fighting our way through the smoke," Barry Mosier said in a phone interview with CNN affiliate KTTC of Rochester, Minnesota. "We couldn't see. We saw flames, especially back toward the wings where the fuel was."

The Mosier's 3-year-old son, Andrew, broke his leg while being pulled out of the wreckage, but 13-year-old April and her parents are only nursing minor bumps and bruises, according to KTTC.

"We were just trying to get out," Barry Mosier said. "My wife grabbed a man who was stuck under a seat but she could not pull him out. There were others crying for help but we just couldn't see very well, and we knew we had to get out of the plane."

According to a manifest obtained by the U.S. Embassy, there were 79 passengers and five crew members aboard the plane.

The final death toll is unclear as rescue workers continue to search the burned wreckage of the DC-9 passenger jet.

A journalist who witnessed the aftermath described "a scene of total devastation and chaos." Watch iReport video of crash aftermath »

Journalist Mick Davie said a crowd gathered "to try to either put out the fire ... or loot what remained of the aircraft."

"Only the very tip of the nose cone and the tail of the airplane were intact," he said. "There was a huge amount of debris -- the roofs of maybe a dozen buildings in the immediate vicinity had been taken off [by the plane]."

He said the plane "didn't actually make it into the air because the runway here in Goma is a little higher than the rest of the town."

The runway was shortened five years ago after a volcano erupted and destroyed nearly half the town.

The flight was heading from the eastern city of Goma to the central city of Kisangani, Ghonda said. He said the cause of the crash is believed to be engine failure.

The plane went down shortly after 3 p.m. (9 a.m. ET) and was still on fire several hours later, Ridout said.

The United Nations and the Red Cross were helping with the rescue effort, which was being hampered by the "very basic, if nonexistent" rescue equipment in the impoverished country, U.N. spokesman Kemal Saiki said.

Those who helped pull people from the burning wreckage said the survivors include the pilot, the co-pilot and a baby, Saiki and Ridout said.

Before the United Nations arrived on the scene with one water tanker, Davie said, Congolese women were filling plastic buckets with tap water and handing them to a line of men "who passed them up to the wreckage and into the flaming fuselage."

He described the scene as "one of the touching and really tragic moments that I saw today."

While "the vast majority of people" who had gathered at the crash site were trying to extinguish the fire and find survivors, Davie said some took advantage of the situation.

"I saw people stuffing airplane meals into their shirts, putting canned food -- which I guess had been on the airplane -- into their pockets, people digging through the debris looking for money and wallets," he said.

Hewa Bora is a private Congolese airline, which the European Union added to its blacklist of carriers just last week. Although all other Congo carriers had been previously banned by the EU, Hewa Bora operated a weekly flight to Belgium "under a special arrangement." That flight was halted last week because of safety violations.

Congolese authorities had not suspended the airline, but Ghonda said, "I'm quite sure they're going to" after Tuesday's crash.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, has a dismal aviation record. There have been 10 plane crashes in the nation since February of last year, resulting in 76 deaths -- not including Tuesday's crash -- according to Aviation Safety Network.

Saiki said because of its poor infrastructure, air travel is one of the few ways to get around the Congo.

"This is the third largest country in Africa, as big as Western Europe, and yet you don't even have 2,000 miles of roads," Saiki said. "So basically most of the transportation in such a big country is done by air." E-mail to a friend

CNN's Atia Abawi contributed to this report.

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