ABUJA,
October 23, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agency) – A Nigerian
airliner with 117 people on board, including several high ranking
officials, crashed overnight shortly after taking off from Lagos en
route to the capital Abuja.
None
of the 117 passengers and crew on board survived, the National
Emergency Management Agency said Sunday, October 23.
No-one
could have survived the impact when the Bellview Airlines Boeing 737
hit the ground at such speed that the wreckage was "completely
buried under ground," a NEMA spokesman told Agence France-Presse
(AFP).
Officials
initially said many of the passengers had survived.
They
said there were 116 people on board, but a copy of the flight manifest
passed to reporters listed 111 passengers and six crew.
The
plane took off at 8:45 p.m. (1945 GMT) and lost contact with the
control tower during a heavy electrical storm.
Officials
said the plane had crashed near Kishi, in a remote rural area 400
kilometers (245 miles) north of Lagos.
There
has been no immediate confirmation of the cause of the crash.
Senior
Officials
A
spokeswoman for the 15-member Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS) said the group's deputy executive secretary for
politics, defense and security, Malian General Cheik Oumar Diarra, and
a Ghanaian finance officer, Emmanuel Quaye, were on board the flight.
Dozens
of flights run 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.
The
privately owned Nigerian airline is popular with expatriates and
Western diplomats feared several of their citizens could have been on
board.
Some
of the private, Nigerian-owned airlines are regarded as unsafe and
shunned by foreign travelers.
Bellview,
however, has usually been regarded as a secure and professionally run
airline.
Nigeria
has a terrible record for aviation safety and has been the scene of
numerous crashes.
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 ploughed into about 10 buildings shortly after take-off.
There
have been a number of recent near misses, including an incident last
month in which an Air France jet arriving in the oil city of Port
Harcourt from Paris hit a herd of cows. No-one was hurt, but the plane
was badly damaged.
