Grim search for bodies in air crash
LAGOS, Nigeria — Emergency crews wearing masks to protect them from the acrid smoke and the stench of the dead searched for bodies in a smoldering, shattered neighborhood near the Lagos airport Monday after the crash of an airliner killed all 153 people on board and an unknown number on the ground.
Apartment buildings, small businesses and roadside shops were smashed to bricks and rubble Sunday when the Dana Air MD-83 plowed into the area about 5 miles short of Lagos’ Murtala Muhammed International Airport.
Pilots on the flight from Nigeria’s capital Abuja to its largest city of Lagos radioed the tower that they had engine trouble shortly before the crash, but the exact cause remained unclear. The weather was clear at the time.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan wept as he visited the IjuIshaga neighborhood. He pledged to make air travel safer, but the crash called into question the government’s ability to protect its citizens and enforce regulations in a nation with a history of aviation disasters.
By nightfall, searchers with police dogs recovered 137 bodies, including those of a mother cradling an infant, according to Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency. Rescuers acknowledged they still didn’t know how many people died in the wrecked apartments and smaller tin-roofed buildings along the narrow streets of Iju-Ishaga.
“The fear is that since it happened in a residential area, there may have been many people killed,” said Yushau Shuaib, a federal emergency management spokesman.
Lagos state, home to 17.5 million people, has grown rapidly in recent years and soon will be home to the most populous city in all of Africa. Massive migration and urban sprawl have brought residential neighborhoods to the boundaries of the airport.
Some U.S. citizens were aboard the flight, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, but he could not provide a firm number. Others killed in the crash included at least four Chinese citizens, two Lebanese nationals and one French citizen, officials said.
Boeing said in a statement on its website that the company is ready to provide technical assistance to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority through the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Dana Air said an investigation was under way with U.S. officials assisting the Nigerian government.
McDonnell Douglas, bought by Boeing in 1997, built the plane, which was first delivered in 1990. It was a long-range variant of McDonnell Douglas’ popular MD-80 series, one of the most widely used plane types in the 1980s and ‘90s. Boeing stopped manufacturing them in 1999, although they still fly in the United States.
Nigeria, home to more than 160 million people, hasn’t had a major airline crash in recent years. But the country has been plagued by a series of crashes in the last two decades, including a September 1992 military transport plane crash that killed 163 people.