GUATEMALA CITY -- A DC-6 cargo airplane crashed in a heavily populated area of Guatemala City Saturday, killing 14 people including the plane's three American crewmen, authorities said.
The four-engine, propeller-driven DC-6, apparently owned by the Miami-based Air Transport Services, Inc. and leased to a Central American air transport company, crashed at about 3 p.m. local time, destroying two houses and sending a mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke into the sky.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known. Fred Farrar, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Washington, said he had received information the U.S.-registered plane crashed after taking off from Guatemala City's Aurora International Airport.
Fire department officials at the scene of the crash said 14 people died and at least 20 were injured. A 6-year-old boy was among the victims, many of whom were in their homes at the time of the crash.
'Right now we have a count of 14 dead that were found among what is left of the wreckage,' said Jorge Molina, a fireman compiling a list of victims at the scene. 'Three Americans died: the pilot, the copilot and the navigator.'
The names, ages and hometowns of the U.S. citizens were not immediately available.
'More will probably die at the hospital tonight. They were in bad shape,' Molina said of the injured, eight of whom were taken in serious condition to local hospitals.
'We don't know how many of the bodies were passengers, but we pulled eight bodies out from the houses in front,' Molina said. 'They died immediately, they didn't have a chance.'
The site of the crash, about 5 miles southeast of the airport, was strewn with burnt remains of the fuselage.
Three-quarters of the plane disintegrated upon impact, leaving only the burnt tail section looking like a broken cross encrusted in two houses that suffered the brunt of the crash.
'We heard a loud whistling sound first, and then the ground shook. The heat, the heat from the flames was tremendous. We had to leave the house because of the heat,' said Carlos Ramon Perez, 18, whose house was across from the two houses that were destroyed by the crash.
'They were pulling out bodies from the houses on the block,' Perez said. 'That house over there, Juan lived there, I used to talk to him. I don't know what's happened to him.'
'Everything is gone. Everything is gone. How could this happen, God, why,' screamed a woman whose house was being consumed by flames.
