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As many as 169 dead in Kenya Airways crash

ABIDJAN: Rescuers pulled 74 bodies out of the sea off Ivory Coast on Monday after a Kenya Airways crash in which as many as 169 are feared to have died.

The Airbus 310 en route to Nairobi via Lagos with 179 people on board, including many Nigerians, up to 14 western Europeans and two U.S. citizens, came down on Sunday evening minutes after taking off from Abidjan international airport.

Ten survivors of Flight KQ431 had been taken to the PISAM private clinic in Abidjan, medical and airline sources said. An ambulance worker said one of the survivors had swum ashore.

A French-owned tuna-fishing boat carried 31 bodies to the port of Abidjan, and tug-boats transported others.

"We have brought 74 bodies ashore, and those are the ones we have seen with our own eyes," Captain Jean-Baptiste Agnimol of the military rescue service told Reuters at the port of Abidjan.

Fearful relatives gathered at the airports in Lagos and Nairobi, where the plane had been due to land on Monday morning.

"We have only been married three months and I didn't even get to say goodbye," said a woman who gave her name as Anne, whose husband had been due to take the flight.

Pleasure boats and small canoes usually used for fishing and transporting goods joined in the search for survivors where the plane came down about 3,000 metres from the shore. They were joined late in the morning by an Ivorian navy vessel.

The crash was the first major airliner disaster of the year and the first crash suffered by Kenya Airways, which is 26-percent owned by Dutch carrier KLM.

"It broke up on impact. It broke into 100 pieces," medical worker Alain Thonar said.

Merchant sailors returning to port said they had seen an escape chute from the plane, a refrigerator and seats floating in the sea.

Gerard Vaudout, a maritime official at the French embassy in Abidjan which was taking part in the rescue operation, said the traditionally strong Atlantic currents off the Abidjan coast were hampering the effort to find more survivors.

"We saw small pieces of the plane, but things are going in all directions because of the current," he said.

The coast of West Africa is prey to treacherous currents which often sweep bathers away.

The Via Avenir, a modern French-owned fishing boat based in Abidjan, brought 31 of the bodies ashore.

"We saw the bodies and got them out by hand. We went out in a Zodiac (inflatable boat) and pulled them out by hand," said one sailor, emotional and exhausted after a harrowing night.

A Reuters correspondent saw the bodies in black plastic body bags, with military rescue workers in black overalls preparing to put them into ambulances and other vehicles ready for transfer to a morgue in central Abidjan.

Around 20 personnel from a French military base in Abidjan were also at the port to give assistance.

Some of the bodies bore no obvious mark of injury. Blood spilled from other body bags as they were carried ashore.

At Lagos airport, KLM officials said that the flight from the Kenyan capital Nairobi had been due to land there before Abidjan but was forced to divert because of the "harmattan", a dusty seasonal wind from the deserts of north Africa.

At Lagos airport, relatives of passengers complained they were getting no information.

An airport official said senior Kenyan Airways officials were on board the plane.

"We don't care about those four. Our families are our problem," said Tayo Kamal, whose brother and sister may have been on the flight.-Reuters