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Kenyan plane crashes off Abidjan, many dead

ABIDJAN: An armada of small fishing boats and navy vessels scoured the ocean off Ivory Coast on Monday for survivors from a Kenya Airways crash in which around 170 people are feared to have died.

The Airbus 310, flight KQ431, from Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan to Nigeria's commercial capital Lagos with 179 people on board, crashed minutes after taking off from the international airport on the outskirts of Abidjan.

Rescuers and medical staff said at least nine and possibly 10 survivors had been thrown clear in the Sunday night crash and taken ashore but the body count rose rapidly after daybreak, with at least 49 corpses fished from the sea.

The crash was Kenya Airways' first and the first major airliner disaster of the year.

"It broke up on impact. It broke into 100 pieces," medical worker Alain Thonar, who is attached to a private emergency service that works with the airport, told Reuters.

"It's sad all those bodies floating everywhere," said Gerard Frere, owner of a fishing boat that took part in the rescue.

Kenya Airways said 168 passengers, most of them Nigerian nationals, and 11 crew were on board.

"We have taken in nine injured people," said Dr Moussa Soumahoro, a doctor at the country's top private clinic. He said one of the nine survivors was seriously hurt.

Boats rescued eight people from the water. An ambulance worker said a ninth survivor had managed to swim ashore.

Thonar travelled by helicopter to the crash site, about 3,000 metres from the shore. "We were seeing bodies floating," he said. The sea was calm but there was no moon overnight.

BANGS HEARD AS PLANE WENT DOWN

Some witnesses reported hearing bangs as the plane went down. "There were three loud explosions," Thonar said, quoting witnesses from the beach. Other witnesses spoke of seeing lights at the surface before the plane went down.

The first to the scene were boats from a local sailing and sea fishing club. "There is wreckage and corpses scattered over a wide area," one source in contact with the rescue boats told Reuters.

Two helicopters with searchlights criss-crossed the scene. Rescuers quoted one survivor, a Nigerian, as saying that the plane had gone done three minutes after takeoff. Thonar said that the plane sent the control tower a radio message, saying that it was going down one minute after takeoff.

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

Rescue sources said kerosene on the corpses compounded the problems of trying to pull in bodies. "We're having trouble pulling them in, it's awful," one rescuer said from the scene overnight.

The nationality of the dead and of all but one of the survivors was not immediately clear. "The identity of those on board is one of the most difficult and sensitive matters we face after an incident like this," a senior official in Abidjan for Dutch carrier KLM told Reuters.

KLM owns 26 percent of Kenya Airways.

Kenya Airways technical director Steve Clarke told a news conference in Nairobi the plane was bought new in October 1986 and was being flown by a very experienced pilot.

Rescuers searched for more than three hours after the crash, before they found the first sign of wreckage.

Hundreds of onlookers gathered on the beach. Several said they saw the plane come down. Some said they had swum out to the wreckage, but that looked less likely, given the distance of the wreckage from the shore.

"I heard the sound of takeoff and then the noise of the plane hitting the water," Andre Desson, a resident living nearby said.

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

Several dozen would-be passengers for the flight waited at Lagos international airport.

"This is terrible. I only thank God that this happened before I went on board," Nigerian trader Ndubuisi Akujurubo told Reuters there.

Kenya Airways said on Friday that it planned to invest over $750 million in the next five years, in part, to modernise its fleet. In a statement, it said that it would gradually replace its Airbus 310s with new Boeing B767-300 jets.-Reuters