Plane crash kills 107, mainly children, in southern city

In the second air disaster in Nigeria in less than two months, an airplane crashed while landing in a storm this weekend in the southern oil industry centre of Port Harcourt, killing 107 people, most of them secondary school pupils from the capital, Abuja. The DC-9 Sosoliso Airline jet with 110 people on board was on a flight from Abuja to Port Harcourt on Saturday afternoon, with a brief stop in the southeastern city of Enugu. At the crash scene in Port Harcourt 103 people were confirmed dead immediately; four of the seven survivors died later in hospital. It was the second major air accident in the country in under two months. A Bellview airliner crashed on 22 October soon after taking off from Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, killing all 117 people on board. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Abuja, John Onaiyekan, said 71 pupils of the church-run Ignatius Loyola Jesuit College died in the Sosoliso crash, of the 75 who boarded. Four of the students disembarked in Enugu. The international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said two of its aid workers, one from France, the other from the United States, also died in the crash. Witnesses said the aircraft was approaching the runway during a storm and suddenly burst into flames amid flashes of lightning. Pieces of wreckage were scattered over a wide area of the runway on Sunday after emergency workers had moved bodies to hospital mortuaries. Aviation investigators arrived at the crash site on Sunday to begin an inquiry into the cause, Tommy Oyelade, permanent secretary in the ministry of aviation, told reporters. "We've been able to recover the black box, the voice and flight data recorders, and handed them to the accident investigators," Oyelade said. President Olusegun Obasanjo on Sunday summoned airline operators in the country to a Tuesday meeting in Abuja to discuss the frequency of crashes and near-accidents recorded in Nigeria recently. A light aircraft crashed on take-off in the northern city of Kaduna two weeks ago killing two people on board, and airlines have complained of the poor state of runways at Lagos airport, the country's main gateway. "President Obasanjo shares the deep pain and grief of the families of all victims of the Sosoliso plane crash," a statement by his spokesperson Remi Oyo said.