Eight Americans were among the 35 nationalities of 157 killed in Ethiopian Airlines crash

Tiksa Negeri/Reuters

People walk at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 10, 2019.

• The CEO of Ethiopian Airlines told reporters Sunday that citizens from 35 countries were killed when a plane crashed shortly after takeoff in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
• Some of the nationalities of the 157 people killed in the crash include 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, and eight Americans.
• The cause of the crash, which involved 149 passengers and 8 crew, is still unknown.

Citizens from 35 countries were killed when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi on Sunday morning, the airline's CEO told journalists.

All of the flight's 157 passengers were killed in the crash, Tewolde Gebremariam said Sunday, among them were 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, nine Ethiopians, eight Italians, eight Chinese citizens, eight Americans, seven British citizens, seven French citizens, six Egyptians, five Dutch citizens, four Indians, four people from Slovakia, three Austrians, three Swedes, three Russians, two Moroccans, two Spaniards, two Poles and two Israelis.

Belgium, Indonesia, Somalia, Norway, Serbia, Togo, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda and Yemen each had one citizen onboard.

Four of those onboard were listed as using United Nations passports and their nationalities were not immediately clear.

Tiksa Negeri/Reuters

Cabin serviettes are seen at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 10, 2019.

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Flight ET 302 crashed at 8:44 a.m. on Sunday morning near the town of Bishoftu, 62 kilometers southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, with 149 passengers and 8 crew.

The cause of the crash is not yet known. However, flight tracking website Flightradar24 detected that the flight had shown "unstable vertical speed" before crashing.

The Ethiopian prime minister's office tweeted his condolences to the families of those lost in the crash.

"The Office of the PM, on behalf of the Government and people of Ethiopia, would like to express it's deepest condolences to the families of those that have lost their loved ones on Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 on regular scheduled flight to Nairobi, Kenya this morning," Abiy Ahmed's official account tweeted on Sunday.

Benjamin Zhang and Adam Bienkov contributed to this story.