Lagos, Nigeria – A Nigerian passenger plane carrying 117 people crashed shortly after takeoff, and officials said Sunday that all aboard were feared dead.
Red Cross and government officials said search teams found no sign that anyone on the Boeing 737 survived when it plunged to earth Saturday night after leaving Lagos, the country’s largest city and its business and financial center.
“It was a very pitiable sight. The aircraft was partly submerged (in the ground) and broken into several pieces,” said Fidelis Onyenyiri, chief of the National Civil Aviation Authority. “There were similarly no survivors from what we saw.”
The U.S. State Department said one American was on the flight.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, grieving for his wife who died in Spain within hours of the crash, asked “all Nigerians to pray for all those aboard the plane and their families.”
Confusion reigned for hours after the disaster, reflecting the sometimes inefficient government in this West African nation of 130 million people and its freewheeling air-transport system, in which a dozen local airlines fly from chaotic airports where crowds fight over seats in planes.
Abilola Oloko, spokesman for Oyo state, where the Bellview Airlines jet went down, initially reported that more than half those on the plane had survived. But he reversed himself a few hours later, blaming chaos at the crash scene for conflicting reports.
Red Cross officials said the wreck was found in a wooded area near Lissa, a small town 30 miles north of Lagos.
A local TV station, Africa Independent Television, broadcast video of villagers looking over the charred wreckage of a white Boeing 737 in a wooded area.
There was no immediate indication of what caused the crash, but it was not thought to be terrorist-related.
“The weather was not too bad, but there was lightning, and an airplane struck by lightning could lose total control,” said Onyenyiri, the civil aviation chief.
He said investigators were searching for the plane’s flight data recorders.
Initial reports indicated that the plane lost contact with the Lagos control tower five minutes after taking off from Murtala Muhammed International Airport at 8:45 p.m. Saturday, said Jide Ibinola, a spokesman for the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria.
The plane was headed to the capital, Abuja, on what was to have been a 50-minute flight from Lagos. The route is frequented by Nigerian officials and foreign executives and diplomats.
As word of the crash spread, representatives of many countries gathered at the Lagos airport to check whether any of their citizens were on board.
Most on the plane were believed to be Nigerians.
