A US military plane crashed into a field in rural Mississippi on Monday night, killing at least 16 people on board and spreading debris for miles, officials said.
The Leflore county emergency management agency’s director, Frank Randle, told reporters at a late briefing that 16 bodies had been recovered after the KC-130 spiralled into the ground about 85 miles (135km) north of Jackson in the Mississippi Delta.
Captain Sarah Burns, a Marine Corps spokeswoman, said in a statement that a KC-130 “experienced a mishap” on Monday evening but provided no details. The KC-130 is used as a refuelling tanker.
Brett Carr, an FBI spokesman, told the New York Times that the agency was sending officials to the scene, but authorities did not believe foul play was involved.
“We’re just trying to offer any type of assistance,” Carr, a spokesman for the bureau’s Jackson, Mississippi office, told the newspaper. “It could be anything from manpower to evidence response.”
The Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, said in a statement on Facebook that the incident was a tragedy, but provided no details.
Andy Jones said he was working on his family’s catfish farm just before 4pm when he heard a boom and looked up to see the plane corkscrewing downward with one engine smoking.
“You looked up and you saw the plane twirling around,” he said. “It was spinning down.”
Jones said the plane hit the ground behind some trees in a soybean field, and by the time he and others reached the crash site, fires were burning too intensely to approach the wreckage. The force of the crash nearly flattened the plane, Jones said.
“Beans are about waist-high, and there wasn’t much sticking out above the beans,” he said.
Jones said a man borrowed his mobile phone to report to authorities that there were bodies across US Highway 82, more than a mile from the crash site.
The Greenwood fire chief, Marcus Banks, told the Greenwood Commonwealth that debris from the plane was scattered in a radius of about five miles 8km).
Jones said firefighters tried to put out the fire at the main crash site but withdrew after an explosion forced them back. The fire produced towering plumes of black smoke visible for miles across the flat region and continued to burn after dusk, more than four hours after the crash.
Aerial pictures taken by WLBT-TV showed the skeleton of the plane burning strongly.
“It was one of the worst fires you can imagine,” Jones said. He said the fire was punctuated by the pops of small explosions.
There no details yet on the possible cause of the crash.
