Nigeria mourns as investigators probe air crash
(AFP)
Updated: 2005-10-24 19:34

Nigeria began three days of national mourning as investigators sought to find out why a passenger airline had crashed to earth and been ripped apart, killing all the 117 passengers and crew on board.

Rescue workers remove the remains of a crash victim, October 23, 2005. Nigeria has begun three days of national mourning as investigators sought to find out why a passenger airline had crashed to earth and been ripped apart, killing all the 117 passengers and crew on board. [AFP]

President Olusegun Obasanjo took personal charge of the inquiry into Saturday's crash and ordered that all flags fly at half mast for three days "as a mark of respect and honour for all those who lost their lives" on board Bellview Airlines flight 210 from Lagos to Abuja.

Emergency workers, meanwhile, continued with the gruesome task Monday of disentangling the shredded corpses of the passengers from the widely scattered wreckage of the Boeing 737 jet, which came down in a cocoa grove in the village of Lissa shortly after taking off from Africa's biggest city.

Police secured the black box flight data recorders on Sunday and investigators hope to find clues as to why an apparently airworthy aircraft, of a model in constant use by airlines across the world, should have suffered such a catastrophic failure as it flew through an electrical storm.

The director general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, Fidelis Onyeriri, said in a televised press briefing that the plane was 24 years old and had passed a full technical inspection, which is valid for 18 months of flying, in February 2005.

Ten hours before it took off on its final journey it had had an additional check, he added.

"The plane didn't come in radio contact when it should have reached 13,000 feet (3,900 meters), which is the normal procedure. So we were alerted, and as there couldn't be any radio contact the plane was declared presumed missing," he said.

"When we came to the wreckage site, the aircraft was completely broken into pieces. There could be no survivors," he added.

Nigeria has a bad record for aviation safety and has suffered similar tragedies in the past, most recently in May 2002 when an airliner ploughed into a crowded suburb of the northern city of Kano and killed at least 115 people on board and scores more on the ground.

But Bellview, the private Nigerian-owned airline that operates flight 210, had a relatively good reputation for safety and was an airline of choice for many west African business travellers.

Nigerian authorities have as yet offered no opinion as to what might have caused the crash. Speculation in Monday's press reports ran the gamut from a lightning or bird strike to a fire on board, a fuel shortage or a bomb attack.

Witnesses on the ground at Lissa told AFP that the plane appeared to explode in mid air before crashing. Debris was scattered over a wide area and the plane retained no recognisable shape. Much of the wreckage was buried in craters up to eight metres (25 feet) deep.

Body parts and torn luggage were scattered around the scene. The Red Cross and the federal emergency management agency said that no-one on board could have survived the disaster.

It was not immediately clear how many foreign nationals had been killed. The Johannesburg daily The Star reported that 31-year-old South African television producer Adele Lorenzo was on board.

US and British diplomats said they were checking to see if any of their nationals were dead.

Also killed was General Cheik Oumar Diarra from Mali, who served as the deputy executive secretary of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) a 15-nation grouping promoting political cooperation in the region.

Diarra's wife N'Deye Marie told AFP that she had been told by ECOWAS officials that the plane exploded in mid-air.