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Nigeria crash update: Airline license suspended
Rescue Workers clear plane wreckage in Lagos, Nigeria. PHOTO/Reuters/Akintunde Akinleye
Mourners silently walked between rows of the dead from a plane crash in Nigeria that killed the 153 people aboard the airliner and others on the ground, peering into burned faces in hopes of claiming the remains of their loved ones on Tuesday.
Those in grief passed by more than a dozen bodies able to be recognized by sight alone in a Lagos hospital parking lot. Onlookers wore surgical masks to block out the smell. As family members softly wept and held each other, Nigeria’s government announced Tuesday it has indefinitely suspended Dana Air’s license, grounding the carrier that operated the MD-83 airplane that crashed in the country’s largest city and now faces widespread public anger.
“We are without eyes,” said Jennifer Enanana, as she sobbed in the parking lot over the death of her younger brother in the crash. She had lost another brother within the year. “We don’t have anybody that will protect us that can stand like a man and defend us. Dana stole him.”
The MD-83 went down in Lagos’ Iju-Ishaga neighborhood, about nine kilometers (five miles) from Lagos’ Murtala Muhammed International Airport. The area has grown dramatically over the decades as Lagos surges toward becoming the largest city in Africa.
That population pressure has seen homes, business and industrial sites shoot up along the approach route used by aircraft landing at the airport, changing what used to be forests and wetlands into a sprawling megacity. The development has put the population there at risk with many aviation disasters in Nigeria over the last two decades. Emergency workers fear a number of on-the-ground deaths from Sunday’s crash that saw the aircraft slam into two apartment buildings, a printing press and a woodworking shop.
By midday Tuesday, searchers had recovered 150 bodies, according to Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency. It’s not yet known how many people died on the ground. Emergency workers were still looking through the debris for bodies, and one damaged building seemed on the verge of collapse.
Fearful family members who once crowded the neighborhood arrived Tuesday to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, where authorities had placed the 43 identifiable bodies so far collected from the crash.
Professor David Oke, the chief medical director of the hospital, told the dozens of relatives and diplomats gathered there that at least 29 had already been identified.
Federal and state authorities have discussed using DNA testing to identify other bodies, though that likely would require massive assistance from laboratories outside of the country.
“We are aware there are more coming in and there are some bodies in our other hospital … that are really burnt beyond recognition and may eventually need more forensic assessment,” Oke said.
Outside the hospital, Ugonna Nwoka said his uncle had been aboard the Dana Air flight that went down in a congested neighborhood on Sunday, turning much of it to rubble. The uncle, who worked for the country’s aviation ministry, suddenly needed to travel to Lagos and picked the Dana flight, Nwoka said.
Nwoka said he tried to go to the crash site on Monday but was pushed away by security forces.
“We stayed for hours trying to plead to see what happened,” Nwoka said. Asked why he needed to see the crash site, Nwoka said if he didn’t it would be “all like a dream, like a drama, like it’s not real.”
Copyright 2012. The Associated Press