A private jet crashed onto a highway near an airport on the outskirts of Malaysia’s capital on Thursday, killing at least 10 people, the authorities said.
Video footage showed a plane appearing suddenly above the highway and crashing moments later, creating a fireball and a cloud of thick, black smoke outside Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital and largest city.
The victims included all eight people on board, a person on a motorcycle and another in a car, Razarudin Husain, the inspector general of Malaysian police, told reporters.
Six of those on the plane were passengers and the other two were crew members, Norazman Bin Mahmud, the chief executive of Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Authority, said in a statement. The crew did not make a mayday call, he said.
The jet had taken off from an airport in Langkawi, an island off Malaysia’s western coast, near the border with Thailand, the statement said. Minutes before it crashed in the city of Shah Alam on Thursday afternoon, it had received landing clearance from the nearby Subang Airport.
The cause of the accident was not immediately clear. The Civil Aviation Authority said that an investigation was planned. Representatives for the agency could not be reached for comment on Friday morning.
A state assemblyman from the state of Pahang, Johari Harun, was among the passengers on the plane, Pahang’s state assembly speaker, Mohd Sharkar Shamsudin, said on his official Facebook page.
Liani MK contributed reporting.
