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Passenger plane crashes into building in Lagos Passenger plane crashes into building in Lagos
(about 2 hours later)
A passenger plane crashed into a two-storey building in Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, on Sunday, officials said. A passenger aircraft crashed into a building in Nigeria's largest city on Sunday.
Casualty figures were not yet known, said Lagos state emergency manager Femi Oke-Osanyinpolu. An emergency services official said the plane had 147 passengers on board. Casualty figures are not yet immediately known. The government said the plane had 153 passengers on board, but it was unclear how many people had been inside the building.
The Dana Air flight was taking passengers from Lagos to Abuja, said Harold Denuren, head of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority. Federal emergency management confirmed the crash in a neighbourhood just outside the airport and said that its emergency personnel were on their way to the scene. Firefighters searching for survivors pulled at least one body from the badly damaged building, and several bodies could be seen in the rubble.
The weather in Lagos on Sunday was clear and sunny. The Dana Air flight was flying from Abuja to Lagos. It did not appear to have nosedived into the building, but seemed to have landed on its belly.
Lagos international airport is a major hub for West Africa and saw 2.3 million passengers pass through it in 2009, according to the most recent statistics provided by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria. It first crashed through a furniture shop and then into residential buildings next to the shop in a densely populated area just north of the airport. The nose of the plane was embedded in the three-storey apartment building, damaging only one part of the structure.
In August 2010, the US announced it had given Nigeria the FAA's Category 1 status, its top safety rating that allows the nation's domestic carriers to fly directly to the US. At the scene, fires still smouldered everywhere as a group of men stood atop the landing gear and took pictures with their mobile phones. Emergency services tried to put out fires in a jet engine and carried at least one body from the building as it continued to crumble. Several thousand people looked on.
The Nigerian government said it now had full radar coverage of the entire country. However, the state-run electricity company is in tatters and state power and diesel generators sometimes both fail at airports, making radar screens go blank. Two fire trucks and about 50 rescue personnel were at the site an hour after the plane went down. The Nigerian Red Cross arrived, as well as Nigeria's air crash safety investigators.
Lagos's international airport is a hub for west Africa, and 2.3 million passengers passed through it in 2009. The government says it has full radar coverage of Nigeria, but power cuts are common and generators sometimes fail at airports, causing radar screens to go blank.