Colombian military plane crash kills 66 and injures dozens.

By LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍ and FEDERICO RÍOS

A Colombian military aircraft transporting 128 troops and crew members crashed shortly after taking off from southern Colombia on Monday morning, killing 66 people and injuring dozens of others, Colombian military officials said at a briefing.

The dead included 58 members of the military, six members of the air force and two police officers, according to defense ministry officials. Four people were still unaccounted for.

The devastating death toll, from a crash in a desolate, jungle-dense region, reverberated across Colombia, as residents rushed to the scene to help rescue soldiers and the military mounted a massive airlift to transport the injured to hospitals.

Colombian officials were still investigating the cause of the crash Monday night.

“At this time we don’t have any more details except that as soon as it took off, the airplane suffered a problem and descended toward the ground, a couple of kilometers from the airport,” Gen. Carlos Fernando Silva Rueda, the commander of Colombia’s air force, said in a video statement.

Colombia’s air force identified the plane as a C-130 Hercules, a large, four-engine turboprop aircraft typically used to transport heavy loads of cargo, military personnel and military vehicles.

The aircraft had taken off from Puerto Leguízamo, a riverside town in the Putumayo region, on Colombia’s border with Peru, at 9:50 a.m. before it crashed.

In a message posted Monday afternoon on social media, President Gustavo Petro said that dozens of people were injured. He thanked the residents in the Putumayo area who scrambled to the crash site on motorcycles and on foot to help those injured and to put out the blaze from the crash.

“That is how a homeland is built,” he said on social media, adding that residents “went all the way to the airport runway and brought water and love to the boys.”

Luis Emilio Bustos, the mayor of Puerto Leguízamo, told The New York Times that at least 14 people who had arrived at the town’s hospital were in “grave condition.”

“We continue to work and continue to conduct rescue missions, taking into account that many bodies fell far away,” he said in a voice message Monday evening. “Others, possibly because of the large amount of fire, will be difficult to find.”

The plane was traveling to Puerto Asís, a town about 125 miles from Puerto Leguízamo. It crashed in a region lined with farms of coca plants harvested to make cocaine, where armed groups involved in illegal drug trafficking have a large presence.