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Nigeria crash update: Many residents feared dead on the ground
Firefighters try to put out the fire in Ishaga district, an outskirt of Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos, on June 3. PHOTO/Xinhua/Tunji Obasa
Emergency workers in Nigeria fought fires and searched for corpses through the night in a neighborhood that an airliner plowed into, killing all 153 on board. Rescue officials said Monday they fear many people may have been killed on the ground too.
After pilots reported engine trouble, the Boeing MD-83 of Dana Air crashed into businesses and crowded apartment buildings near Lagos’s Murtala Muhammed International Airport on Sunday, the worst air disaster in Nigeria in nearly two decades.
“The fear is that since it happened in a residential area, there may have been many people killed,” said Yushau Shuaib, a spokesman for Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency.
The cause of the crash remained unclear Monday. The pilots radioed to the Lagos control tower just before the crash, reporting engine trouble, a military official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to journalists.
Rescue workers searched for the aircraft’s black box recorders where flight data is stored, said Harold Demuren, the director-general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority.
The aircraft appeared to have landed on its belly amid clear, sunny skies onto the dense neighborhood that sits along the typical approach path taken by aircraft heading into the Lagos airport. The plane tore through roofs, sheared a mango tree and rammed into a woodworking studio, a printing press and at least two apartment buildings before stopping. The plane was heading to Lagos from Abuja, the capital, when it went down.
A white, noxious cloud rose from the crash site that burned onlookers’ eye. Pieces of the plane were scattered around the muddy ground.
Local residents helped carry fire hoses to the crash site.
Nigeria, home to more than 160 million people, has a history of major aviation disasters, though in recent years there hasn’t been a crash. In August 2010, the U.S. announced it had given Nigeria the Federal Aviation Administration’s Category 1 status, its top safety rating that allows the West African nation’s domestic carriers to fly directly to the U.S.
On Saturday night, a Nigerian Boeing 727 cargo airliner crashed in Accra, the capital of Ghana, slamming into a bus and killing 10 people. The plane belonged to Lagos-based Allied Air Cargo.
Lagos-based Dana Air, owned by the Indian corporation of the same name, has five aircraft in its fleet and runs both regional and domestic flights. Local media reported a similar Dana flight in May made an emergency landing at the Lagos airport after having a hydraulic problem.
Nigeria has tried to redeem its aviation image in recent years, saying it now has full radar coverage of the entire country.
Sunday’s crash appeared to be the worst since September 1992, when a military transport plane crashed into a swamp shortly after takeoff from Lagos. All 163 army soldiers, relatives and crew members on board were killed.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press