19 dead in Taiwan plane crash

TAIPEI, Feb. 4 -- A Taiwan TransAsia Airways plane crashed into a Taipei river on Wednesday morning, 19 have died and 15 injured.

A total of 27 passengers have been rescued and taken to nearby hospitals in Taipei and New Taipei City, but some remain trapped in the plane or have been swept downstream.

The rescue team are currently drilling holes into the aircraft's body, possibly preparing to raise it out of water.

Flight ATR-72, which was headed for Kinmen from Taipei, had 58 people on board including 31 passengers from the Chinese mainland. It crash landed in the Keelung River after clipping an elevated motorway with its wing at 10:55 a.m., ten minutes after take off from Taipei Songshan Airport.

A taxi, with a man and a woman inside, was hit by the aircraft's wing.

The 31 Chinese mainland passengers were on organized trips, managed by two travel agencies from Xiamen City in the southeast mainland province of Fujian, the Taiwan tourism authority confirmed.

The State Council Taiwan Affairs Office and the Association for Relations across the Taiwan Straits launched a joint emergency response operation and are being kept up to date by Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council and the Straits Exchange Foundation.

They extended condolences to the victims as well as other passengers on board and urged those on the ground to do as much as they could to rescue the aircraft's passengers and crew.