Rescuers work at the site where a plane plunged into a river in Taipei, southeast China's Taiwan, February 4, 2015. A Taiwan TransAsia Airways plane crashed into a Taipei river on Wednesday morning, killing at least eight people. Flight ATR-72, which was headed for Kinmen from Taipei, had 58 people on board, including 31 passengers from the Chinese mainland. Photo: Xinhua

Combined photos taken by an automobile data recorder shows an airplane crashes over a bridge in Taipei, southeast China's Taiwan, February 4, 2015. A plane of the Taiwan TransAsia Airways came down into a Taipei river Wednesday, with more than 50 people on board, confirmed the civil aviation authorities of Taiwan. Contact with the ATR-72 Flight, scheduled from Taipei to Kinmen, lost at about 11 a.m. Then the plane was found in the river by the Nanhu Bridge. Photo: Xinhua

 
A Taiwan TransAsia Airways plane crashed into a Taipei river on Wednesday morning, 13 have died and three are in a critical condition, a Xinhua reporter on the scene reported.

A total of 27 passengers have been rescued and taken to nearby hospitals in Taipei and New Taipei City.

Flight ATR-72, which was headed for Kinmen from Taipei, had 58 people on board including 31 passengers from the Chinese mainland, and five crew members.

The plane has been in use since April 2014 and was subject to a safety check in January, according to local authorities.

It crash landed in the Keelung River after clipping an elevated motorway with its wing at 10:55 a.m., ten minutes after taking off from Taipei Songshan Airport.

A taxi, with a man and a woman inside, was hit by the aircraft's wing.

The 31 Chinese mainland passengers were on organized trips, managed by two travel agencies from Xiamen City in the southeast mainland province of Fujian, the Taiwan tourism authority confirmed.

The State Council Taiwan Affairs Office and the Association for Relations across the Taiwan Straits launched a joint emergency response operation and are being kept up to date by Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council and the Straits Exchange Foundation.

They extended condolences to families of the victims and urged those on the ground to do as much as they could to rescue the aircraft's passengers and crew.