No survivors in Nigerian plane crash
14.10.05
All 117 people died on board an airliner when it crashed shortly after take off in Nigeria. The plane lost contact with the control tower five minutes after taking off from Murtala Muhammed international airport in Lagos, said Jide Ibinola, a spokesman for the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria.
Abilola Oloko, a spokesman for Oyo state where the plane came down on Saturday, had earlier raised hopes that more than half of those on board had survived. But he later asserted that 'the latest reports coming to us say that all the people on the plane died'. He blamed confusion at the crash scene for the conflicting reports.
Lagos police spokesman Bode Ojajuni said search teams located the crashed Boeing 737 aircraft, operated by Nigerian-run Bellview Airlines, near the town of Kishi, about 120 miles north of the city of Lagos, from where the plane took off.
Ibinola said the craft was headed to Abuja on what was supposed to have been a 50-minute flight. The flight is popular among Nigerians and expatriates shuttling between Lagos and the capital, Abuja.
Airline officials said 117 people were on board - 111 passengers and six crew members. There was no immediate indication on the cause of the crash or if flight-data recorders had been located at the scene.
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