An Indonesian airliner with more than 130 people aboard burst into flames and shot off the runway after landing in Yogyakarta city yesterday, killing at least 23 people, officials said.
Witnesses and survivors described a horrific inferno that swept through the Boeing 737-400 of state carrier Garuda, with some lucky enough to walk away while others were trapped and burnt to death inside.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said four people from a party of Australian officials and journalists following his visit to Indonesia were among those unaccounted for. Downer was not on the plane.
There was confusion throughout the day over the death toll and even how many people were aboard the doomed jet, as Indonesian officials struggled with the second tragedy in two days after an earthquake killed dozens on Tuesday.
A local official put the initial death toll at 49, the airline later said it was 22 and the transport ministry then put it at 23. Garuda said 112 people came out alive, and that all but three had been injured.
There were also conflicting accounts from passengers of what went wrong as the plane came in to land at Yogyakarta, on the central island of Java, but the air force commander at the airport said the plane was going too fast.
"It ran about 300m off the runway," First Air Marshal Benyamin Dandel told Detikcom news Web site.
Parts of the jet, including the wheels and wings, appeared to have been sheared off. Some witnesses said a tyre blew on landing.
Badly burned journalist Cynthia Banham, of Australia's Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, told a colleague about the ordeal from the hospital.
"She thought she was going to die, she talked about burning alive and people being burnt alive," fellow reporter Mark Forbes told Australian radio after visiting Banham.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ordered an investigation into the cause of the crash, a spokesman said, while Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he had no reason to believe terrorism was involved.
But Howard told his country to prepare for "bad news."
"There were up to 10 Australians on board and not all of those have been accounted for," he said.
Television pictures showed firefighters battling giant flames and thick smoke spewing from the broken fuselage as it lay smouldering off the end of the runway.
The plane appeared to have ploughed off the end of the runway before coming to rest in a nearby rice field.
"There was a bump [and] then the plane wobbled, and from the back people were screaming `Fire!'" said Nunik Sufithri, a public works ministry employee who was on the plane.
Yunadi Srimulyo, 33, said he leapt from an emergency exit and landed on a burning piece of the plane.
He said he had just arrived with four other people after years in South Korea working in a factory.
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