Scores of schoolchildren heading home for the Christmas holidays were among the 103 people killed on Saturday when a passenger jet crashed as it attempted to land in the southern Nigerian city of Port Harcourt.
Witnesses said the accident site was horrific, with the remains of those on board and pieces of the burning wreckage strewn over a large area. There were only seven survivors, all of whom were taken to a nearby hospital.
The McDonnell Douglas DC-9, operated by the Nigerian-owned private airline Sosoliso, was on its way from the capital, Abuja, to the southern oil city, when it tried to land during an electrical storm. It broke into pieces on impact and burst into flames. Witnesses say there were lightning flashes as the plane descended.
Distraught family members waiting at the airport said 75 secondary-school students from a Jesuit college in Abuja had been among the 103 passengers and seven crew on board.
A spokesperson for the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, Sam Adurogboye, said the survivors had all been breathing when they were taken to hospital and were responding to treatment. It was not clear if they were passengers or crew members.
”The place where I’m standing now is scattered with corpses,” said an airport worker. ”Many of the dead were burned beyond recognition.”
Bodies were already being sent to mortuaries.
The crash is the second resulting in substantial loss of life in Africa’s most populous country in the past seven weeks. On October 22, a Boeing 737-200, operated by another private Nigerian airline, Bellview Airlines, crashed after taking off from Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, bound for Abuja, killing all 117 people on board.
Air travel within Nigeria, which has a population of 130-million, has grown dramatically in the past decade but has a poor safety record. Aviation experts say many aircraft used in the country are second-hand and more than 20 years old, and runways are regularly closed because of poor maintenance.
However, Sosoliso, which was established in 1994, and began operating as a domestic airline in 2000, was considered one of the safer ones.
Airports in the country have also been criticised recently after a series of near misses, including an incident at Port Harcourt in which an Air France passenger plane crashed into a herd of cows on the runway.
Airlines briefly suspended flights at Lagos International airport to protest holes on its runway.
After the October crash, President Olusegun Obasanjo ordered tighter safety and maintenance procedures for all Nigerian aircraft, and told the aviation ministry to ”plug loopholes” to ensure passenger safety. — Guardian Unlimited Â