China plane crash kills 53

BEIJING – A small passenger plane carrying 53 people crashed in a northern Chinese lake immediately after takeoff, and the government said there were no survivors.

The plane crashed in Baotou, a city in the Inner Mongolia region, seconds after taking off at about 8:20 a.m., the official Xinhua News Agency said. The China Eastern Airlines flight, which was heading to Shanghai, was carrying 47 passengers and six crew members, the agency said.

All were confirmed dead by government officials in Baotou, it said.

The plane crashed into a frozen lake in Nanhai Park “only about a dozen seconds” after taking off, Xinhua said. The area is about 330 miles northwest of Beijing.

A worker in the ticket office at Baotou Airport said the crash site was just outside the airport in a park surrounding a tributary of the Yellow River.

Police and firefighters were breaking the ice on the lake to search for victims. State television reported that 17 bodies had been pulled from the lake by midday. It showed pieces of the burned-out plane sitting in the lake, as emergency workers in small rowboats pushed ice out of the way.

“Witnesses said that the plane broke into flaming fragments,” the Xinhua report said, adding that a house next to the park was damaged and several yachts were scorched.