Passenger Plane Carrying Over 150 Crashes in Lagos, Nigeria
A plane struck a two-story building in Nigeria's largest city of Lagos on Sunday, resulting in an unknown number of casualties, officials said.
The head of the Civil Aviation Authority told AFP that the plane was carrying 153 passengers.
"I don't believe there are any survivors," Harold Demuren said.
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 neighborhood just outside the airport and said that its emergency personnel were on their way to the scene.
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.
In August 2010, the U.S. 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 U.S.
The Nigerian government said it also now has full radar coverage of the entire nation. However, in a nation where the state-run electricity company is in tatters, state power and diesel generators sometimes both fail at airports, making radar screens go blank.
