Scores of people were killed when a passenger plane crashed and burst into flames shortly after take-off Tuesday at Goma in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, airport sources said.

An official working in the control tower at Kinshasa airport said he had received information from Goma that of about "100 people on board, there were six survivors, including the pilot and co-pilot."

The DC-9 jet, chartered by the private Hewa Bora Airline, was leaving to fly westwards to the capital Kinshasa when it crashed in Goma's Birere market area at around 2:30pm (1230 GMT).

There were casualties on the ground, with three charred bodies and around 60 injured residents taken to Goma's general hospital, a hospital official told AFP.

"The casualty toll is difficult to establish," said Thomas Okelo of the national air traffic authority RVA in Goma.

"At the start, there were 152 passengers on the manifest," he said, but some of those disembarked and Okelo estimated that at the time of take-off, about "85 people" were on the plane.

Various airport sources in Goma, the capital of Nord-Kivu province on the border with Rwanda, spoke of "dozens" dead in the burnt-out wreck of the plane, which crashed on houses beyond the end of the runway.

It was the fifth fatal plane crash in DR Congo since June 2007. The last was in October when a cargo aircraft ploughed into a working-class district of Kinshasa and killed at least 50 people.

An AFP journalist saw five survivors -- two Congolese with a baby and two white people -- being looked after by rescue workers.

UN fire crews were sent to the crash site in a bid to help put out the blaze, said Tahirou Diao, a spokesperson in Goma for the UN peacekeeping mission in the country.

One survivor said on the DRC's UN-sponsored Radio Okapi that a tire burst during takeoff.

After the plane had crashed, the survivor said he found an "opening" in the wreckage and leapt out on to the ruins of a house that had been crushed.

Eyewitnesses saw a huge plume of smoke and flames rising from the area after the crash.

Staff of the Hewa Bora Airline could not be reached to confirm how many passengers and crew were on the plane.

The Hewa Bora Airline had, until last week, been the country's only private company authorized to fly to Europe out of more than 50 registered operators.

The DR Congo's terrible air safety record can partly be attributed to the fact that much of the domestic fleet consists of ancient Soviet-era planes that get little proper maintenance.

PHOTO CAPTION

People gather at the crash site of the Hewa Bora Airways passenger jet in Goma, capital of Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern North Kivu province, April 15, 2008.

AFP