A passenger jet carrying 98 people crashed into a building shortly after takeoff from Almaty International Airport in Kazakhstan on Friday morning, killing at least 12 people and injuring scores more.

The crash of the Bek Air plane was the latest aviation tragedy to befall a former Soviet republic, a region plagued by a still-chequered safety record even as passenger numbers increase with the proliferation of low-cost carriers like Bek, a small Kazakh airline.

Most of the passengers survived, the Kazakh authorities said. There were conflicting reports on the total number of people on board, but the Health Ministry, in a statement, eventually fixed the numbers at 93 passengers and five crew members.

Among the dead, Interfax reported, were the plane’s 38-year-old captain, Marat Muratbayev; an editor for a Kazakh news outlet, Dana Gruglova, who was 35; and a prominent Kazakh major general, Rustem Kaydarov, 79.

Almaty, in southeastern Kazakhstan near the mountainous border with Kyrgyzstan, is the Central Asian country’s biggest city.

Kazakh news outlets showed the fuselage of the passenger jet ripped to pieces in the snow amid the rubble of a building. Rescue workers combed the wreckage. In one photo, emergency workers were seen picking through the debris — a red suitcase, a building’s window frame and pieces of the aircraft.

At 7.22am, the plane, a Dutch-made Fokker 100, bound for Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital, lost altitude and crashed into a two-story building in a residential area near the airport, officials said.

Eight people were confirmed dead at the scene, two more while being treated at the airport and another two after being taken to a hospital, officials said. Ten people were reported hospitalised in critical condition.

A surviving passenger, Aslan Nazaraliyev, 34, said he was watching the TV show Billions in an aisle seat in row 15 when the plane started “rocking like a boat” as it gained altitude after takeoff. Then, he said, it started shaking violently and people on board started to panic, even as the craft continued to climb.

About a minute later, “the flight got out of control”, like a car skidding on ice, Nazaraliyev, a businessman whose company makes professional cleaning supplies, said in a phone interview.

The plane started to fall at an angle before it made impact some 20 seconds later, he said, slamming into a two-story building, pieces of which rained down. A man and woman to his right opened the emergency exit and clambered out, slipping and falling on the plane’s icy wing.

Guided by their smartphone flashlights and by people’s moans, Nazaraliyev and others dragged the injured away from the plane for fear it would catch fire.

Nazaraliyev said he was unharmed in the crash. After rescue workers arrived, he got a ride back to the same airport from which he had just departed and then took a cab home. He said that some survivors asked if they would get their tickets refunded and when they would get their luggage back.

“I said, ‘Guys, you should be happy you’re alive’, Nazaraliyev recalled.

“Where is the ambulance?” a woman can be heard saying on a video from the scene circulated by the Kazakh news media. “People are asking for an ambulance and it’s not arriving.”

In another video, apparently filmed about 20 minutes after the crash, people can be heard moaning and screaming. No emergency workers can be seen. “We’re taking them out on our own and helping on our own,” a man says.