COTONOU, Benin, 28 December 2003 — With bodies still washing ashore from a Christmas Day plane crash that killed at least 138 people, including 15 UN peacekeepers, the West African nation of Benin yesterday declared three days of national mourning.
Lebanese Foreign Affairs Minister Jean Obeid, arriving home from a brief trip to Benin, said overloading may have caused the tragedy.
“It appears that the number of passengers exceeds the normal number, in addition to the load, which it appears was very much in excess,” he told reporters after arriving in Beirut with 15 survivors, including 12 Lebanese, two Palestinians and a Syrian.
The Boeing 727 had 161 people aboard when it clipped a building near the airport’s perimeter just after takeoff in Cotonou, the commercial capital, and plummeted into the shallow surf just off Benin’s Atlantic Ocean coast.
In all, 21 people including a pilot are known to have survived Thursday’s crash, Benin Foreign Affairs Minister Rogatien Biaou said over state radio.
On Friday night, the search for survivors had been called off and 130 bodies, mostly Lebanese, had been recovered, Biaou said.
Yesterday, eight more swollen bodies washed ashore, taken away by medical teams in ambulances to overcrowded morgues in the city. Two of the corpses were those of Iranian citizens, said Mohammed Reza Samara, an Iranian diplomat based in neighboring Nigeria who came to the beach yesterday to identify the bodies.
The Bangladeshi military announced that 15 of the dead were its own — Bangladeshi peacekeepers serving in missions in the war-ravaged West African nations of Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The peacekeepers — 13 from Sierra Leone and two from Liberia — were returning home on holiday, Bangladesh’s military said in a statement from Dhaka.
French investigators were expected to arrive in Benin yesterday to help search for the plane’s flight data recorder, Transport Minister Ahmed Akobi said. The cockpit voice recorder was recovered Friday.
Huge chunks of the shattered Boeing 727 were still on the beach, including a smashed wing, two destroyed engines and the cockpit, laying on its side. The bulk of the plane was hauled out of the water with the help of tractors Friday.
Onlookers thronged the area, and with no police or security forces guarding the site, young boys searched through the pockets of torn clothes and sifted through ripped baggage for valuables to loot. Some lounged on tattered aircraft seats from the downed plane.
Benin’s government ordered the start of three days of national morning, and flags were lowered at government buildings in the impoverished country of 9 million as a mark of respect to the victims.
Lebanon, meanwhile, ordered flags flown at half staff yesterday and today as a sign of mourning.
A military cargo plane sent by France was waiting to airlift corpses to Beirut.
“Right now we’re working to identify the bodies to get them ready for evacuation today,” said Ayoub Ali, a Lebanese official coordinating the evacuation.
In Cotonou’s main city morgue, relatives of the victims, mainly Lebanese, huddled in groups trying to identify the dead, holding handkerchiefs over their noses to guard against the corpses’ stench.
“Quite a number of the victims in the morgue have not been identified and this is creating difficulty about where to evacuate them,” said Gamel Hassan, a Lebanese diplomat. One Nigerian man was searching through the city’s morgues looking for his missing brother, who had boarded the Beirut-bound flight. “I’m really in a fix not finding him among the survivors and among the dead,” he said. “I want to have some definite news for our family.”
