Rescuers mounted a grisly operation in southern Cameroon on Monday to recover the remains of 114 people from a crash site where a Kenyan Airways jet came down in a violent storm on Saturday.
Luc Ndjodo, a prosecutor for the city of Douala, said that the first bodies had been picked up from the mangrove swamp where the Boeing 737-800 crashed.
As the crash occurred in a dense jungle in the area 20km southwest of Douala, it took rescuers 36 hours to find the mangled wreckage of the six-month-old aircraft.
PHOTO: AFP
The plane was carrying a crew of nine from Kenya and 105 passengers from 26 other countries. There were no survivors.
Late on Monday, Cameroonian civil aviation officials announced that they had found one of the two black boxes from the plane at the crash site.
"We found the flight data recorder. We still need to recover the cockpit voice recorder," civil aviation director general Ignatius Sana Juma said.
The black boxes store a variety of information such as a plane's speed, altitude and voice communications in the cockpit.
They are also equipped with beacons to aid rescuers in locating them and are vital in ascertaining the cause of a crash.
Police official Emmanuel Meka said the body-recovery operation had stopped on Monday night but would continue yesterday.
The plane's jets were ripped from the wings, a reporter at the site said.
Rescuers made their way through the mud and gnarled pieces of metal, collecting remnants of clothes and bodies that were then transported to the town of Mbanga-Pongo, an hour's walk away, for identification.
Parts of bodies were strewn about the site, the reporter said.
Officials from Boeing and the US National Transportation Safety Board were scheduled to arrive at the accident site yesterday to help in the investigation.
Cameroonian aviation officials said the flight, KQ 507, disappeared from radar screens on Saturday shortly after taking off in bad weather.
A Kenyan aviation official on Monday said the plane could have been struck by lightning.
The rescue work was being conducted under tight security with police guarding the site and helicopters hovering overhead.
Villagers armed with machetes helped cut an emergency path to the wreckage as Cameroonian troops cordoned off the area.
Kenyan officials praised Cameroon's handling of the crash.
"It was very well planned in terms of search and rescue and I do not believe the flight could have been found any earlier," Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua said.
An additional Kenya Airways support team of 14, including counselors and French speakers, headed for Cameroon on Monday.
Kenya Airways CEO Titus Naikuni said he would leave for Douala early yesterday.
The subsidiary of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) in Kumamoto, Japan, turned a profit in the first quarter of this year, marking the first time the first fab of the unit has become profitable since mass production started at the end of 2024. According to the contract chipmaker’s financial statement released on Friday, Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Inc (JASM), a joint venture running the fab in Kumamoto, posted NT$951 million (US$30.19 million) in profit in the January-to-March period, compared with a loss of NT$1.39 billion in the previous quarter, and a loss of NT$3.25 billion in the first quarter of
DRONE CENTRAL: Taiwan aims to become Asia’s democratic hub for drones, with most exports focused on high-quality military-grade models, an official said Taiwan’s drone industry is expected to expand significantly by 2030, producing 100,000 units per month and exporting half of them, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Current drone production capacity is about 15,000 units per month, but the industry can quickly scale up as demand increases, Industrial Development Administration Director-General Chiou Chyou-huey (邱求慧) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s drone output grew 2.5-fold last year to NT$12.9 billion (US$408.3 million) under a government program to develop the uncrewed vehicle sector, he said. The Executive Yuan in October last year approved plans to invest NT$44.2 billion into domestic production of uncrewed aerial
RESOLUTE BACKING: Two Republican senators are planning to introduce legislation that would impose immediate sanctions on China if it attempts to invade Taiwan US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday reaffirmed US congressional support for Taiwan, saying the US and “all freedom-loving people” have a stake in preventing China from seizing Taiwan by force. Johnson made the remarks in an interview with Fox News Sunday on US President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) last week. In an interview that aired on Friday on Fox News, just as Trump wrapped up a high-stakes visit to China, he said he has yet to green-light a new US$14 billion arms package to Taiwan and that it “depends on China.” “It’s a very good
US President Donald Trump yesterday said he would speak to President William Lai (賴清德) as his administration considers whether to move ahead with a US$14 billion weapons sale to Taiwan — a potential arms deal that has drawn criticism from China. “Well, I’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody,” Trump told reporters yesterday when asked if he had any plans to call his counterpart, although he did not offer a time frame for when such a conversation could take place. Trump previously said he would speak to the person “that’s running Taiwan,” without specifying who he meant. “We have that situation very
RSS