A small passenger plane crashed seconds after taking off from a Caribbean island near mainland Honduras on Monday, killing all but five of the 17 people on board, the authorities said. Among those killed was Aurelio Martínez, a popular Honduran musician and politician, his record label said in a statement.
The Jetstream 32 aircraft was carrying 15 passengers and two crew members when it departed Monday evening from an airport on the island of Roatán, the civil aeronautics agency of Honduras said in a statement. The flight’s destination was La Ceiba, a nearby city on the country’s northern coast, the agency said.
The National Police of Honduras said on social media that 12 people aboard the plane had died and five had survived. The survivors were pulled from the ocean by fishermen who were working near the crash site, said Franklin Borjas, the fire chief for the municipality of Santos Guardiola, near where the crash took place.
Aldair Alemán, one of the fishermen, told a local news channel that after the crash, he began seeing bodies in the water. He then realized that some of the people were alive, drowning and begging for help. He and another fisherman began pulling them into their small boat, rescuing four people before handing them off to firefighters, he said.
“They were in a moment of shock — they just wanted to get on the boat” he said. Some people had bones protruding from their bodies, he said; others had severe facial injuries.
Videos posted by the national police on social media show rescue workers lining up on the rocky coastline and pulling people from the water, then laying them on stretchers.
The authorities were still trying to pull out the body of the co-pilot, which remained trapped underwater inside the plane, Mr. Borjas said. Recovering the aircraft’s fuselage and black box would take more time, Mr. Borjas added, because the area where the plane crashed is surrounded by reefs, making navigation difficult.
The five people who survived the crash were transported by plane to a hospital in the city of San Pedro Sula, Mr. Borjas said.
Mr. Martínez, a singer and songwriter, was one of the biggest performers and proponents of the music of the Garifuna people, descendants of Indigenous Caribbean tribes and enslaved Africans who settled on the Caribbean coast of Central America.
He was the founder of Lita Ariran, one of the first Garifuna groups to perform on an internationally distributed recording, according to his record label, Real World Records. He later became one of the first Black representatives in the National Congress, the Honduran legislature.
“Aurelio was more than just a musician — he was a statesman, a spokesperson and vital savior of the culture of the Garifuna people of Honduras,” his record label wrote in the statement. “His loss will be felt beyond the Garifuna people to audiences worldwide who love and cherish Caribbean culture.”
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear. The civil aeronautics agency said that an investigation had begun.
Roatán, about 35 miles from the Honduran mainland, is the largest of the Bay Islands and is a popular Caribbean destination for divers seeking pristine coral reefs.
