The death toll from Sunday's plane crash in Tanzania has risen to 19, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa said, after the Precision Air flight with dozens of passengers plunged into Lake Victoria while approaching the northwestern city of Bukoba.
Majaliwa told a crowd after arriving at the airport in Bukoba, where the flight had been scheduled to land from the financial capital Dar es Salaam.
regional authorities said 26 survivors out of the 43 people on board PW 494 had been pulled to safety and taken to a hospital in the lakeside city.
Precision Air, a privately-owned airline, said in a statement that 24 people had survived the accident, while an airline official told AFP that the other two hospitalised patients were not aboard the plane to begin with.
The airline said it had dispatched rescuers and investigators to the scene and expressed its 'deepest sympathies' over the accident.
The aircraft, which was an ATR 42-500, was produced by ATR, a French-Italian firm, and had 39 passengers, including an infant, and four crew members on board.
Video footage broadcast on local media showed the plane largely submerged as rescuers, including fishermen, waded through water to bring people to safety.
Emergency workers were unable to lift the aircraft out of the water using ropes, helped by cranes as residents also sought assistance.
The disaster is among the deadliest plane crashes in the East African nation's history.
Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union Commission, also voiced his condolences, as did Peter Mathuki, the secretary-general of the regional East African Community bloc.
In a Twitter post, Faki said the president had resigned, resigning as a director.
Also on Twitter, Mathuki said, ''It's a good day to be on Twitter,'' Mr Mathuki said.
In 1993, Precision Air, which is partly owned by Kenya Airways, was established, and operates domestic and regional flights as well as private charters to renowned tourist destinations like Serengeti National Park and the Zanzibar archipelago.
The accident comes just four years after 11 people died when a plane belonging to safari company Coastal Aviation crashed in northern Tanzania.
In March 2019, a Ethiopian Airlines flight to Nairobi from Addis Ababa plunged six minutes after take-off into a field southeast of the Ethiopian capital, killing all 157 people on board.
The disaster, five months after a similar crash in Indonesia, triggered the global grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft model for 20 months before it returned to service in late 2020.
In 2007, a Kenya Airways flight from Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, to Nairobi, Kenya's capital, crashed into a swamp after take-off, killing all 114 passengers.
In 2000, a Kenya Airways flight from Abidjan to Nairobi crashed into the Atlantic Ocean minutes after take-off, killing 169 people, while 10 survived.
A year earlier, a dozen people, including 10 US tourists, died in a plane crash in northern Tanzania, which flew between the Serengeti National Park and the Kilimanjaro airport.