|
All 117 people, 111 passengers and six crew, on board a Nigerian airliner that crashed shortly after takeoff from the country's commercial capital Lagos have been killed, officials said on Sunday.
"Bellview Airlines announces with deep regret the loss involving our aircraft B737-200A flight number B3210 of Saturday October 22, 2005 with a total of 117 souls on board," the air company’s chairman Tunde Yusuf told reporters.
Cao, an official at the Chinese consulate general in Nigeria, said that though he had not received any reports of missing Chinese nationals, three foreign employees of Huawei Company, based in south China's Shenzhen City, were killed in the crash.
"We have now located the accident site at Lissa village, 16 nautical miles [29.6 km] northwest of Lagos airport," Yusuf said. "We have not been able to locate any survivors."
At the site of the wreckage, Ade Aboluyrin, commandant general of Nigeria Security and Civil Defense Corps, told Xinhua News Agency that "the crashed Bellview Boeing 737 was totally buried after a big explosion late Saturday night,"
"All people on board the plane were dead," Aboluyrin said. "There is no way anyone boarding the plane could survive because the whole plane was buried completely."
Work to recover victims’ remains, assisted by the Red Cross, have been hampered by a lack of roads to the site of the crash.
Fidelis Onyeyiri, director general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, said the plane, manufactured in 1981 and still in serviceable condition, lost contact with the control tower shortly after it took off at 8:35 PM on Saturday en route to Abuja, the capital.
(Xinhua News Agency October 25, 2005)
|
