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Rescue workers gather mutilated bodies following the crash of Bellview Airlines in the village of Lissa in the Ifo district, southwest Nigeria, 23 October, 2005. Nigerian rescuers struggled to gather and identify hundreds of severed body parts scattered Sunday amid smoking debris at the site of an airliner crash which rescuers said killed all 117 people on board. (Photo: Xinhua/AFP)

     LISSA, Nigeria, Oct. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- All 117 people, including 111 passengers and six crew members on board a Nigerian airliner, which crashed shortly after takeoff from the country's commercial capital Lagos, have been killed, officials said on Sunday.

    "Bellview Airlines announces with deep regret the loss involving our aircraft B737-200A flight number B3210 of Saturday October 22, 2005 with a total of 117 souls on board," the airlines' chairman Tunde Yusuf told reporters.

    "We have now located the accident site at Lissa village, 16 nautical miles (about 29.6 km) northwest of the Lagos airport," Yusuf said. "We have not been able to locate any survivor."

    At the site of the wreckage of the ill-fated plane, Ade Aboluyrin, commandant general of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defense Corps, told Xinhua "the crashed Bellview Boeing 737 was totally buried after a big explosion late Saturday night,"

    "All people on board the plane were dead," he said. "There is no way any one boarding the plane could survive because the whole plane was buried underground."

    Amid smoking debris at the site which is a big hole about 25 meters in diameter and 10 meters deep caused by the crash, scores of rescue members, most of them Red Cross members, are busy collecting parts of the dead bodies and moving parts of the ill-fated plane's tail and wings.

    Documents, tickets, clothing, as well shoes are scattered everywhere at the site around the hole. Several ambulances were trying but could not get to the site only because there was no motorway.

    Fidelis Onyeyiri, director general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, confirmed that there appeared to be no survivors. He said that the plane, manufactured in 1981 and still in serviceable condition, lost contact with control tower shortly after it took off at 8:35 p.m. (1935 GMT) on Saturday en route to Abuja, the capital.

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    "Our preliminary appraisal suggests that the aircraft might have started stalling after passing flight level 130, lost control, then nosedived into the ground and created a huge crater into which it disappeared," he said.

    He told a press conference that the plane may have been struck by lightning before it went down. "The weather was not too bad butthere was lightning. From our experience, an airplane struck by lightning could lose total control. So there is a likelihood of a natural cause."

    Nigerian Postmaster General Alhaji Abubakar Musa Argungu was aboard the aircraft, his aide confirmed. It was also said that the plane was carrying a US military officer, and a top official of the Economic Community of West African States and a Nigerian presidential aide. The nationalities of other passengers, however, could not been confirmed so far.

    The list of the passengers and crew members were read out earlier in Lagos. Heartbroken women and men yowled and some fainted and fell to the ground when they heard their relatives' names. But the airline's chairman stressed they could not exclude the possibility that some passengers were using other persons' tickets.

    Earlier in the day, Adeola Oloko, spokesman for neighboring Oyostate government, said about half the passengers had survived but later withdrew his statement.

    Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, whose wife, Stella Obasanjo, died in the early hours of Sunday after undergoing a surgery in Spain, called for prayers for all those aboard the plane and their families.

    Bellview, a privately owned Nigerian company, is considered oneof the few most reliable of the dozens of local airlines and has not suffered a crash before.

    Saturday's crash also added to the catalogue of air mishaps in the west African country, the most populous in the continent, including one in May 2002 when an airliner slammed into a residential area in the northern city of Kano, killing some 150 people both on board and on the ground. Enditem

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