NIGERIA: Rescue workers and investigators yesterday combed blackened rubble where a Nigerian airliner crashed into a packed residential district, killing at least 148 people and tearing a swathe through the city.
President Olusegun Obasanjo ordered an immediate investigation and announced two days of national mourning, as stunned relatives queued at a city hospital to try to identify the remains of their loved ones.
The Nigerian Red Cross said initial figures showed that 148 people had died, another 49 were injured and in hospital and that hundreds had been made homeless in the northern city of Kano.
It said 75 people had been on board the twin-engine passenger aircraft when it ploughed into the densely inhabited area on Saturday, levelling homes and a school. Hospital officials said only five on board had survived.
Rescue workers picking through the devastated suburb of Gwammaja said more bodies could yet be found and that many were too badly charred to be identified. As weeping, stunned residents looked on in horror, Red Cross volunteers tried to reunite families and contact relatives of the 75 people the organisation said were on the aircraft.
Under a thick cloud of dust and in baking sun, the residents struggled to salvage what they could of their valuables, initial disbelief and anger giving way to despair.
Local volunteers bore the brunt of the overnight search for bodies and survivors after the police and fire brigade appeared overwhelmed by the tragedy, an AFP reporter at the scene said.
The area of the crash, a patch of around 30 tin-roofed houses with a Mosque and a Koranic school, was cordoned off around the blackened route that the aircraft tore through the town.
The British Aerospace 1-11-500 aircraft, operated by private carrier EAS, crashed shortly after take-off on a the second leg of a domestic flight from Jos to Lagos. As it climbed away from Kano airport witnesses saw it bank sharply from side to side before plunging into a fatal nose dive and ploughing into the flimsy shacks and mud brick houses.
Mr Shehu Tofa, an engineer with another airline, was one of those who raced to the scene to help in the rescue. He told AFP that the plane's black box flight recorder had been recovered.
The Nigerian airline industry was deregulated in the 1980s and more than half a dozen private carriers now criss-cross the skies of the large west African republic. Travellers often complain of overloading and poor maintenance.
Nigeria's Sports Minister, Mr Ishayu Mark Aku, who had been travelling to see Nigeria's last home match before the World Cup finals, was among the dead.
A match against China, planned for May 11th, was cancelled as a mark of respect.