A small passenger plane crashed seconds after taking off from a Caribbean island near mainland Honduras on Monday, killing all but five of the 17 people on board, the authorities said. Among those killed was Aurelio Martínez, a popular Honduran musician and politician, his record label said in a statement.

The Jetstream 32 aircraft was carrying 15 passengers and two crew members when it departed Monday evening from an airport on the island of Roatán, the civil aeronautics agency of Honduras said in a statement. The flight’s destination was La Ceiba, a nearby city on the country’s northern coast, the agency said.

The National Police of Honduras said on social media that 12 people aboard the plane had died and five had survived. The survivors were pulled from the ocean by fishermen who were working near the crash site, said Franklin Borjas, the fire chief for the municipality of Santos Guardiola, near where the crash took place.

Aldair Alemán, one of the fishermen, told a local news channel that after the crash, he began seeing bodies in the water. He then realized that some of the people were alive, drowning and begging for help. He and another fisherman began pulling them into their small boat, rescuing four people before handing them off to firefighters, he said.

“They were in a moment of shock — they just wanted to get on the boat” he said. Some people had bones protruding from their bodies, he said; others had severe facial injuries.

Videos posted by the national police on social media show rescue workers lining up on the rocky coastline and pulling people from the water, then laying them on stretchers.

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