Lagos air crash: No survivors, officials say
The BBC's Will Ross in Lagos: "Are enough safety checks being done?"
A
passenger plane with about 150 people on board has crashed into
buildings in a densely populated district of Nigeria's main city of
Lagos.
Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority said there were no
survivors on board the Dana Air plane. The cause of the crash is not yet
known.
Thousands of onlookers gathered at the crash site as rescue services searched the rubble for survivors.
President Goodluck Jonathan has declared three days of mourning.
The plane crashed in Iju neighbourhood, just north of the
airport. It is not yet clear how many people may have died on the
ground.
Black smoke billowed at the crash scene
TV pictures showed chaotic scenes as crowds swarmed the crash
site, some helping pass along hoses to douse the smoking wreckage.
Soldiers tried to disperse the onlookers using rubber whips
and even their fists, witnesses said. Some local residents reacted by
throwing stones at the troops.
Smoke billows
The commercial aircraft was flying from the Nigerian capital, Abuja, to Lagos when it crashed and burst into flames.
Plane wreckage including a detached wing was scattered around and the body of the plane was lodged into a building.
The wreckage was on fire and black smoke billowed.
Several charred corpses could be seen in the rubble.
"We heard a huge explosion, and at first we thought it was a
gas canister," Timothy Akinyela, 50, a newspaper reporter who had been
in a nearby bar with friends told Reuters.
At the scene
It was difficult to reach the crash site because it is in a built-up part of Lagos.Hundreds of people gathered in the thick smoke, and on rooftops and balconies, trying to catch a glimpse of the wreckage.
Police, ambulances and the fire brigade are still trying to sift through the debris.
Residents of the Iju-Ishaga area of Lagos said they heard a loud bang on Sunday evening. The plane crashed into a printing press, and burst into flames.
A few surrounding buildings were also damaged and caught fire. The crash site was littered with secondary school textbooks from the printing press.
Rescue personnel will be working through the night although they did not seem to have enough equipment to light up the area.
They will have a hard time dealing with the growing crowd in that very densely populated part of Lagos.
"Then there were some more
explosions afterwards and everyone ran out. It was terrifying. There was
confusion and shouting," he said.
The plane did not to appear to have nose-dived into the
building but to have landed on its belly, careering into a furniture
shop and a print works, reports said.
Casualties on the ground may have been minimised because it was Sunday and the buildings were likely to have been empty.
An investigation is under way but in difficult night-time conditions, says the BBC's Will Ross in Lagos.
Officials told AFP the cockpit recorder had been found and given to police.
Technical problem
In a statement, President Jonathan declared three days of
mourning and said he had ordered the "fullest possible" investigation
into the crash.
The crash had "sadly plunged the nation into further sorrow
on a day when Nigerians were already in grief over the loss of many
other innocent lives in the church bombing in Bauchi state", the
statement said.
The weather at the time of the crash was overcast - but there were none of the storms that regularly strike the city.
On 11 May a similar Dana Air plane - possibly the same one -
developed a technical problem and was forced to make an emergency
landing in Lagos, our correspondent adds.
Nigeria, like many African countries, has a poor air safety
record, though some efforts have been made to improve it since a spate
of airline disasters in 2005.
Dana Air's website says it operates Boeing MD-83 planes to cities around Nigeria out of Murtala Muhammed Airport.
The airport is a major hub for West Africa and saw 2.3
million passengers pass through it in 2009, according to the most recent
statistics provided by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria.
------
No comments:
Post a Comment