More than 150 dead after plane crashes into buildings in Lagos

Several charred corpses could be seen in the rubble of a building damaged by the crash, as firefighters searched for survivors and pulled a dead body from the wreckage.

Nigeria’s Civil Aviation Authority’s Harold Demuren said that all aboard the Dana Air flight had died.

The Lagos state government said in a statement that 153 people were on the flight going from Abuja to Lagos.

Yushau Shuaib, spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency, said there wereprobably more casualties on the ground, but the number was unknown. He said they were also still trying to get an official manifest on the flight. Sometimes flights in Nigeria issue paper tickets and do not record all passengers via computer.

The plane did not to appear to have nose-dived into a building, but seemed to have landed on its belly. It first crashed through a furniture shop and then into residential buildings next to the workshop in this densely packed neighbourhood.

The nose of the plane was embedded into the three-storey apartment building, damaging only one part of the structure. Fire still smouldered everywhere as several thousand people looked on. A group of men stood atop the landing gear that was smoking and took pictures with their mobile phones.

Praise Richard, a witness, said he was watching a film when he heard a loud explosion that sounded like a bomb. He rushed outside and saw massive smoke and flames rising from the crash site around 3:45pm local time.

At the crash site, an Associated Press reporter saw parts of the plane’s seat signs scattered around. Firefighters tried to put out the smouldering flames of a jet engine and carried at least one corpse from the building that continued to crumble.

Two fire engines and about 50 rescue personnel were at the site after the plane went down. Some of those gathered around the site helped firefighters bring in the water hoses from their trucks.

The Nigerian Red Cross arrived, as well as Nigeria’s air crash safety investigators.

It was not immediately known what type of plane it was, but Dana Air’s website says that the company operates its Lagos to Abuja and Abuja to Lagos flights using a Boeing MD83 aircraft.

A military helicopter flew overhead. The sound of the crowd was also occasionally punctuated by the noise of aircraft still landing at the airport.

Lagos’s 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.

The presidency said in a statement the crash “has sadly plunged the nation into further sorrow on a day when Nigerians were already in grief over the loss of many other innocent lives in the church bombing in Bauchi state”.

A suicide car bomber drove into a north Nigeria church’s compound yesterday and detonated his explosives as worshippers left an early morning service, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens more, officials and witnesses said

The bomber targeted the Harvest Field church in a neighbourhood near the airport in Bauchi, sending walls crashing onto those inside. Others were burned. The remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei echoed Iran’s previous hard-line positions, but take on added resonance amid talks with the US and five other world powers.

Western leaders hope for a diplomatic accord that would ease concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, while Israeli officials say they leave all options open to try to derail Iran’s uranium enrichment.

The West fears Iran could one day produce weapons-grade material.

Khamenei called the claims of a secret weapons program “lies” and repeated Iran’s statements that it only seeks reactors for energy and medical research.

Khamenei put Israel on notice that any military action would bring swift consequences.

“Should they take any wrong step, any inappropriate move, it will fall on their heads like lightning,” he warned in a speech marking the 23rd anniversary of the death of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Many military analysts say air strikes alone are unlikely to seriously set back Iran’s uranium enrichment and could touch off a wider conflict in the Gulf, which is the route for about one fifth of the world’s oil.

Instead, the US and Europe have imposed tighter sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports and its ability to conduct international banking.

“The obstacles enemies are creating in our path won’t have any effect. Sanctions are ineffective. Sanctions can’t stop the Iranian nation from moving forward,” Khamenei said at Khomeini’s mausoleum south of Tehran.

“The only effect these unilateral and multilateral sanctions have on the Iranian nation is that they deepen hatred and animosity toward the West in the heart of our people,” he said.

Iran has called for the West to roll back the sanctions as a goodwill gesture to move ahead the nuclear talks, which are scheduled to resume later this month in Moscow.

In Baghdad last month, the six world powers – the UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany – demanded that Iran stop its most sensitive uranium enrichment in return for incentives such as spare parts for civilian aircraft.

Iran’s 20 per cent-level enrichment – the highest publicly acknowledged – worries Western leaders because it is far closer to weapons grade than the 3.5 per cent enriched material needed for energy-producing reactors.

Iran says it uses the 20 per cent for its medical research reactor for applications such as cancer treatment.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on world powers last week to push Tehran to stop all nuclear enrichment, remove from its territory all material that has been enriched and demolish the underground Fordo enrichment facility near the city of Qom, about 80 miles south of Tehran.

Israel has long viewed a nuclear Iran as an existential threat because of its frequent calls for the destruction of the country and its continuing support for anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Khamenei said Israel is now more vulnerable than any other time, with pro-US regimes fallen in the Arab Spring, and claimed the US and its allies are concentrating on the Iranian nuclear issue to “cover their own problems”.