Seoul, 29 May

A South Korean navy plane with four crew members crashed during a training flight on Thursday, killing at least two and leaving emergency workers searching for the others, the navy said.

The P-3 patrol plane took off from its base in the southeastern city of Pohang at 1.43 pm but fell to the ground due to unknown reasons, the navy said in a statement.

Cho Young-sang, a navy officer overseeing the search efforts, said in a televised briefing that workers found the bodies of two crew members and were preparing to transfer them to a nearby hospital. He said workers were continuing to search for the other two.

There were no immediate reports of civilian casualties on the ground. The navy said in a statement that it established a task force to investigate the cause of the crash and temporarily suspended all flights of P-3s.

An emergency office in Pohang said that rescue workers and fire trucks were dispatched to the site after receiving reports from local residents that an unidentified aircraft fell onto a hill near an apartment complex and caused a fire.

The scale and damage of the fire wasn't immediately known. Yonhap news agency published photos showing firefighters and at least one water truck operating near the crash site, with flames flickering as black-gray smoke engulfed the trees.

In December, a Jeju Air passenger plane crashed at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea, killing all but two of the 181 people on board. It was one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea's aviation history.