Rescuers pulled scores of bodies and eight survivors from the sea off Ivory Coast yesterday after a Kenya Airways crash in which as many as 169 people are feared dead.
The Airbus 310, en route to Nairobi via Lagos with 179 passengers and crew, crashed into the water on Sunday evening minutes after taking off from Abidjan airport.
Most of the 168 passengers on Flight KQ431 were Nigerians, the airline said. Other travellers were from the US, Canada, Japan, western Europe, Kenya and other African states.
The eight survivors were taken to a private clinic in Abidjan. An ambulance worker said one of the survivors had managed to swim ashore.
"I heard screaming and crying. I yelled in French and in English. But no one responded. I could not see anything. It was totally dark," said Mr Jean Pascal Danneels, a French veterinarian who survived the crash and swam to shore.
"The plane was loaded with a lot of baggage. When we finally took off, it turned towards the left, and I felt the air rush in.
"Suddenly I found myself in the water upside down. I must have been thrown out," said Mr Danneels, who suffered minor burns from fuel which leaked into the water.
Kenya Airways said the aircraft was not known to have any technical problems. A spokesman declined to comment on speculation that desert sands, blown up by strong seasonal winds, could have affected its engines.
Capt Jean-Baptiste Agnimol, of the military rescue service, said his team had counted 74 bodies.
"We saw the bodies and got them out by hand. We went out in a Zodiac [inflatable craft] and pulled them out by hand," said a crewman of a French-owned tuna fishing boat.
The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder "black boxes", which could provide vital clues to the cause of the crash, were still missing yesterday.
Experts from Kenya Airways and the European manufacturers of the plane were on their way to the crash site to assist Ivory Coast crash investigators.
"There will be an awful lot of work to be done investigating the causes of the crash," said Kenya Airways' technical manager, Mr Steve Clarke. "These things are not done quickly."
Relatives gathered at the airports in Lagos, Nigeria, and Nairobi, Kenya, where the plane had been due to land yesterday morning.
Pleasure boats and small canoes, usually used for fishing and carrying goods, joined in the search for survivors where the jet came down about 3,000 metres from the shore.
The crash was the first major airliner disaster of the year and the first crash suffered by Kenya Airways, which is 26 per cent owned by the Dutch carrier KLM.
"It broke up on impact. It broke into 100 pieces," a medical worker said.
Merchant sailors returning to port said they had seen an escape chute, a refrigerator and seats floating in the sea.
A maritime official at the French embassy in Abidjan said the traditionally strong Atlantic currents off the Abidjan coast were hampering the effort to find survivors.
"We saw small pieces of the plane, but things are going in all directions because of the current," he said.
Some of the bodies had no obvious mark of injury, but blood spilled from some body bags as they were carried ashore.
At Lagos airport, KLM officials said that the flight from Nairobi had been due to land there before Abidjan but was forced to divert because of the "Harmattan", a dusty seasonal wind from the deserts of north Africa.
The European Airbus Industrie consortium said the aircraft was delivered to Kenya Airways in September 1986, and had accumulated some 58,000 flight hours in about 15,000 flights.
Jane's Information Group forecast the disaster would reopen a debate on air safety in Africa.
The International Federation of Airline Pilot Associations warned of poor safety and air traffic control over large parts of the continent in 1996.
Rescue teams abandoned their search last night, saying there was no hope of finding any more passengers alive.
"The search has been halted. The chances of finding any more survivors is zero," a military attache at the French embassy said.
Military personnel from a French base in Ivory Coast had earlier joined Ivorian military and the rescue teams to look for survivors.