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LISSA,
Nigeria, Oct. 23 (Xinhuanet, By Lin Xiaochun, Dai Adi) -- 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 as 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.
"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
theplane 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 rule out 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.
Describing the crash as a "natural disaster," a
government statement, declared three-day mourning for the victims and ordered
all flags to fly at half-mast throughout the period from Monday.
Government television regulator Nigeria Broadcasting
Commissionmean while ordered the closure of African Independent Television and
Raypower for "professional misconduct." The two were the firstto reveal the
actual site of the crash and to broadcast footage of the scene.
Bellview, a privately owned Nigerian company, is
considered one of 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 [1] [2] [3] [4] | 
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