LAGOS, 24 October 2005 — A Nigerian airliner with 117 people aboard crashed and disintegrated in flames shortly after take-off from Lagos and there were no signs of survivors, officials said yesterday.
The plane broke apart on impact with swampy earth near Lissa, about 30 km (20 miles) north of Lagos, shortly after leaving for the Nigerian capital of Abuja on Saturday night.
“I can’t confirm if there are any survivors, but there is no trace so far,” Nigerian Red Cross General Secretary Abiodun Orebiyi said by telephone after visiting the scene. “The plane was totally destroyed. It was scattered everywhere.”
Dismembered and burned body parts, fuselage fragments and engine parts were strewn across a large area of disturbed earth, according to images of the crash scene broadcast by the local AIT television station. A check for 948,000 naira ($7,200) from the evangelical Deeper Life church was one of a number of personal papers found in the wreckage.
There was a smoking 70 foot (20 meter) crater where the main impact occurred and the roofs of nearby houses were blown off by the impact, Orebiyi said.
“The aircraft has crashed and it is a total loss. We can’t even see a whole human body,” a senior Ogun state police official said from the crash site.
The Boeing 737-200 was believed to be carrying a top official of the Economic Community of West African States, a US consular official, two Britons and some other Europeans, diplomats and airline officials said.
Bellview Airlines flight 210 left at 8.45 p.m. and lost contact minutes later during a heavy electrical storm. It was carrying 111 passengers and six crew, the Federal Airport Authority said, updating an earlier figure of 110 passengers. The pilot made a distress call after take-off, indicating the plane had a technical problem, a source at the presidency said.
Distraught relatives wailed and prayed at the Lagos airport as a Bellview Airlines official read out a list of passengers. The list may not be entirely accurate because tickets are often transferred between people in Nigeria, the official said.
The route the airliner was taking is heavily traveled, with dozens of flights each day between the port of Lagos — one of the world’s biggest cities — and Abuja in the heart of Africa’s most populous nation.
Earlier yesterday, a spokesman for Oyo state, Adeola Oloko, said the crash was 150 km north of Lagos and about half the passengers had survived. Emergency rescue helicopters went to that site only to find nothing there.
Oloko later retracted that statement in a telephone conversation with Reuters. Aviation analysts questioned why there was so much confusion and delay in finding the crash site.
Bellview Airlines is a privately owned Nigerian airline and is popular with expatriates. It recently began international flights to India and London.
In Seattle, Boeing spokeswoman Liz Verdier said the company would work with the US National Transportation Safety Board if the board was asked to help with any investigation in Nigeria.
She said the 737 was the “workhorse of the world commercial jet fleet.” More than 140 people died in May 2002 when a Nigerian airliner slammed into a poor suburb in the northern city of Kano, killing people on board and on the ground. The aircraft plowed into about 10 buildings shortly after takeoff.
