Nigerians demanded answers of their country's ramshackle aviation industry on Sunday after the latest in a series of airline crashes killed 107 people, including 71 children from a single Abuja school.
The death toll from the tragedy grew overnight as four of the seven passengers who were pulled alive from the wreckage lying strewn alongside the runway at Port Harcourt airport succumbed to severe burns, Police Commissioner Samuel Adetuyi said.
Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja said that 71 of the dead were from the Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja, students aged between 11 and 18 who were traveling home to the southeast of the country to spend Christmas with their families.
PHOTO: AP
Accident investigators have found the airliner's "black box" flight data recorders and were sending them to Lagos for analysis, said a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority, Sam Aduroboye.
The crash, which came just seven weeks after a similar disaster killed 117 people, sparked the fury of President Olusegun Obasanjo, the press and the victims' relatives. Many pointed to the poor safety record of Nigeria's motley crew of private airline operators.
"All Nigerian aircraft are flying coffins," wailed 24-year-old John Baligo, who came to Port Harcourt University Teaching Hospital to pick up the body of his elder brother but was sent away to find paperwork to prove his connection with the deceased.
Senior officials visiting the site of Saturday's disaster said the crowded Sosoliso Airlines DC-9 passenger jet appeared to have veered off the runway shortly after landing in heavy rain.
The plane apparently hit a drainage ditch and tore apart.
Transport minister Abiye Sekibo told reporters at the scene: "You can see that it hit this culvert. This is the reason for this accident. The man lost control because he hit this culvert."
Neither Saturday's crash nor the Oct. 22 disaster in which another airliner crashed in fields north of Lagos has been fully explained, amid mounting concern that Nigeria's aging passenger jets and shoddy airport infrastructure are no longer fit to carry travelers safely.
The latest tragedy brought the number of dead in 39 Nigerian aviation accidents since 1991 to 1,021, according to a tally of press reports. Several of the crashes remain unexplained, in some cases several years after they took place.
Obasanjo canceled a planned state visit to Portugal and ordered aviation officials and airline executives to meet him today in Abuja for emergency talks on safety for the country's aging fleet of privately owned airliners, his spokeswoman Remi Oyo said.
Speaking in Abuja, Archbishop Onaiyekan told the story of the schoolchildren's last flight.
"I have reliable information that at least 71 of our children in Loyola Jesuit College perished in that air crash," he said, adding that the airline had a special arrangement with Loyola College to fly the school party to Port Harcourt, where they were to be picked up by their parents.
"So, sadly, the parents were actually there at the airport and saw what happened. So you can imagine the great trauma for the parents watching their own children just roasting there," he said.
Medical aid agency Doctors Without Borders said that two of its workers were also among the dead.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.