Nigeria crash update: Search ends for victims

Rescue officials in Nigeria said Wednesday they have ended their search for bodies in the site where an airliner crashed into a densely populated area, killing all 153 people aboard the plane and a still-unknown number of people on the ground.

Workers cleared away the remaining pieces of the wreckage of the MD-83 aircraft Wednesday from Iju-Ishaga, the Lagos neighborhood about nine kilometers (five miles) from Lagos’ Murtala Muhammed International Airport where the Dana Air flight went down on Sunday. Emergency workers there have recovered 153 complete corpses as well as fragmented remains, said Yushau Shuaib, a spokesman for Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency. It is unclear if the fragmented remains represent less than a dozen victims, or dozens.

Officials now plan to survey the neighborhood to find who remains missing after the plane smashed into two apartment buildings, a printing business and a woodshop, Shuaib said. Authorities have discussed using DNA to identify the dead.

The cause of the crash on a sunny, clear Sunday afternoon remains unclear. The crew radioed the tower that they had engine trouble shortly before the plane went down. Authorities already have collected the flight voice and data recorders and plan to examine them for analysis.

Popular anger has risen in the country against the airline since the crash. On Tuesday, the federal government of Nigeria indefinitely suspended Dana Air’s license to fly in the country, as a safety precaution, said aviation ministry spokesman Joe Obi.

Officials with Dana Air could not be immediately reached for comment. A statement posted to the company’s website described the airline as “professionally managed,” saying the flight’s captain had logged 18,500 flight hours, with 7,100 hours on an MD-83.

Dana Air said the plane that crashed had its last safety inspection on May 30 and was certified to fly by regulators in Nigeria.

The crash is the worst to hit Nigeria since September 1992, when a military transport plane crashed shortly after taking off from Lagos, killing 163 people.

Copyright 2012. The Associated Press