British national on board death flight

Family members have travelled to the country to help to find Antonia Attuh’s body among those of the 153 passengers who were on the Dana Air flight which crashed about five miles north of Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, south-west Nigeria, on Sunday.

Her sister Jill Chime, from Liverpool, said Ms Attuh was a frequent traveller to Nigeria and was flying to Lagos for a course.

“My sister was a wonderful person, quite an exceptional person,” she said. “She was a statistician – maths was the thing she loved doing and loved most.”

Ms Chime was at her parents’ house on Sunday when they first heard about the crash.

“My sister was travelling to Lagos and that was as far as I knew. I wasn’t certain of what airline she had gone on. We were immediately concerned because we had spoken to my sister in the morning and she was telling us she was going to Lagos that afternoon.”

Ms Attuh’s husband had dropped her off at the airport to catch the doomed flight and she had arranged for a cousin to meet her from Lagos airport, but the plane never arrived.

Ms Chime said: “I also have my cousin who yesterday had gone through 30-odd bodies trying to locate her, and today he has gone through a further 40. But as of yet, we still have no confirmation of a corpse.”

The plane was flying from the Nigerian capital Abuja when it crashed into a printing works and residential buildings in the busy Iju-Ishaga suburb.

Officials in Nigeria have ended the search for bodies and are trying to establish how many people may have been at the crash site at the time it happened.

Yushau Shuaib, a spokesman for Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency, said searchers have recovered 153 bodies from the crash site in Lagos.

The cause of the crash is unknown but the crew had reported engine trouble shortly before it happened.