THE grieving families of Kano buried their dead on Monday, consigning many to a mass grave two days after an airliner crashed into the northern Nigerian city, flattening homes and killing 149 people.
Many of the dead were burned beyond recognition in the disaster and could not be claimed by their families, forcing the city to take emergency measures to prevent the spread of disease.
”The government delayed the burial for as long as possible,” said Ibrahim Ado, representative for the governor of Kano state Musa Kwankwaso. ”But we could wait no longer because the bodies are decomposing.”
Of the dead brought to Kano’s hospitals, 66 were unclaimed on Monday. Ten were held back because relatives had identified but not collected them, but 56 remained anonymous, said Tahar Adamu, the governor’s religious adviser.
Ahead of the burial hundreds grieving relatives, some sobbing uncontrollably, gathered in front of the palace of Emir Ado Bayero, Kano’s traditional ruler, for the Muslim prayer ceremony.
”I have lost everything I suffered for,” said Alhaji Malamai, a young textiles trader who blinked back tears as he told how his wife and child had been buried beneath the rubble of his shattered house.
Six trucks brought the dead from the nearby Murtala Mohammed hospital wrapped in white shrouds. At the cemetery the dead were lowered into two freshly dug trenches, laid down side by side and covered in Kano’s baked dusty earth. A sombre crowd looked on.
”May God give them eternal rest and forgive them their sins. I feel for them like for my own relations. This has been a catastrophe,” murmured 32-year-old Muhmad Mustapha as the crowd dispersed into the twilight.
A stench of death hung over the hospital, where earlier families and reporters had seen mangled, blackened bodies — many of them children –lying in the morgue. During the day the rescue operation had ended and one more body had been found, bringing the final death toll from Saturday’s tragedy to 149, Patrick Bawa of the Nigerian Red Cross said. Earlier President Olusegun Obasanjo had made a brief early morning visit to the scene of the crash, a ruined group of around 30 tin-roofed homes and a Koranic school in a low-class suburb.
He promised compensation for the victims and vowed a full inquiry into why the twin-engined passenger jet nose-dived shortly after take-off and scythed through a residential quarter.
In Murtala Mohammed, one of the handful of passengers who survived the flight, retired Brigadier General Emmanuel Ikegwoha, told AFP about its final moments.
”As we took off the plane began to wobble, to shake from side to side. Just by military instinct I bent myself double. The next thing I knew I was here,” he said. Ikegwoha, who is in his fifties, remained in a coma for 24 hours after the crash, and suffered serious burns to his head, hands and thighs, medical officials said.
According to conflicting reports between two and five of the 79 on board survived. Monday was an officially designated day of mourning in Kano, flags flew at half mast and many stayed away from work. But the accident investigation went on, as questions were once again raised about safety standards in Nigeria’s motley array of private air carriers.
The head of the federal government’s investigation team in Kano, Remi Faminu, said that the plane’s black box flight recorder would have to be sent outside Nigeria for analysis.
At least one Briton died on board the plane and officials were attempting to find out if another boarded the plane in Kano, a representative for the Deputy British High Commission in Lagos said.
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. As recently as last month, the government vowed to force the firms to retire aging airframes. Foreign diplomats are also concerned about safety standards, and many are banned from travelling on Nigerian domestic flights. ? Sapa-AFP