(CNN) – At least 33 people died Tuesday when a plane tore through a neighborhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo city of Goma, with only one of the victims confirmed as a passenger, a United Nations representative told CNN Wednesday.

The final death toll is still unclear, but Kemal Saiki, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in DR Congo, said the numbers are based on information collected by U.N. workers from three hospitals in the eastern city of Goma.

Many of the victims are believed to be people who lived and worked in the Birere neighborhood where the plane broke apart and burst into flames after plowing through a crowded marketplace, Saiki said.

More than 100 people were hospitalized with injuries, he said.

The DC-9 passenger jet, operated by Hewa Bora airlines, crashed shortly after taking off from Goma’s airport. The pilot, who is hospitalized, told U.N. officials he tried to abort the take-off after an engine failed.

Because of the shortened runway at the Goma airport, there is no room for error and the pilot said he skidded out of control after putting on the brakes.

The pilot said the flight data recorder had been retrieved, Saiki said.

The plane was heading from Goma to the central city of Kisangani when it crashed, according to Congolese government official Antoine Ghonda.

The aircraft burned for several hours, and thousands of people scrambled to help extinguish the fire with buckets of tap water. Ghonda said the cause of the crash was believed to be engine failure.

According to a manifest obtained by the U.S. Embassy there were 79 passengers and five crew members aboard the plane. Ghonda and Saiki said the entire crew survived the crash.

Among the passengers who survived were members of an American missionary family from southeastern Minnesota — Barry and Marybeth Mosier, and their children April and Andrew.

“It was horrible, fighting our way through the smoke,” Barry Mosier said in a phone interview with CNN affiliate KTTC of Rochester, Minnesota. “We couldn’t see. We saw flames, especially back toward the wings where the fuel was.”

The Mosier’s 3-year-old son, Andrew, broke his leg while being pulled out of the wreckage but 13-year-old April and her parents are only nursing minor bumps and bruises, according to KTTC.

“We were just trying to get out,” Barry Mosier said. “My wife grabbed a man who was stuck under a seat but she could not pull him out. There were others crying for help but we just couldn’t see very well and we knew we had to get out of the plane.”

A journalist who witnessed the aftermath described “a scene of total devastation and chaos.”

“There was a crowd of somewhere between 10 and 15,000 people who had gathered to try to either put out the fire … or loot what remained of the aircraft,” journalist Mick Davie said.

He said the plane “didn’t actually make it into the air because the runway here in Goma is a little higher than the rest of the town.”

The runway was shortened six years ago after a volcano erupted and destroyed nearly half the town.

Saiki said 200 U.N. peacekeepers remain stationed around the crash site to prevent looters and make sure the scene was not compromised for investigators and recovery workers. Watch iReport video of crash aftermath »

The DC-9 was operated by a private Congolese airlines called Hewa Bora, which the European Union added to its blacklist of carriers only last week. Although all other Congo carriers had been previously banned by the EU, Hewa Bora operated a weekly flight to Belgium “under a special arrangement.” That flight was halted last week because of safety violations.

Congolese authorities had not suspended the airline, but Ghonda said, “I’m quite sure they’re going to” after Tuesday’s crash.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, has a dismal aviation record. There have been 10 plane crashes in the nation since February of last year, resulting in 76 deaths — not including Tuesday’s crash — according to Aviation Safety Network.

Saiki said because of its poor infrastructure — eroded by years of fighting — air travel was one of the few ways to get around the Congo.

“This is the third largest country in Africa, as big as Western Europe, and yet you don’t even have 2,000 miles of roads,” Saiki said. “So basically most of the transportation in such a big country is done by air.”