A small plane crashed in the parking lot of a mall in the US state of California, killing all five people on board, the authorities said.

The twin-engine Cessna plane was en route to John Wayne Airport when the pilot declared an emergency and crashed around 12:30 pm local time in Santa Ana yesterday, near the South Coast Plaza shopping mall, CNN reported. The plane crashed just a block away from the mall. There were no injuries on the ground. The plane hit an unoccupied, parked vehicle on the ground, but the owner was in a store at the time of the crash, said Tony Bommarito, the public information officer with Orange County Fire Authority.