Indonesian plane crashes off Jakarta (Lead)

Jakarta : A Lion Air Boeing 737 passenger plane came down crashing minutes after taking off from here on Monday, said Indonesian officials.

"It has been confirmed that it has crashed," Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for the national search and rescue agency told the media. Flight JT-610 was on a scheduled flight from the Indonesian capital to Pangkal Pinang, the main city in the Bangka Belitung Islands. It lost contact with ground control a few minutes after take-off, as it was crossing the sea, the BBC reported. It was not immediately clear how many people were on board the plane, a Lion Air official earlier told the BBC, and added that the company did not yet know what had happened to the plane. The aircraft was reported to be a Boeing 737 MAX 8, a model only in use since 2016.