LAGOS, Nigeria - Emergency crews wearing masks to protect them from the acrid smoke and the stench of the dead searched for bodies in a smoldering, shattered neighborhood near the Lagos airport Monday after the crash of an airliner killed all 153 people on board and an unknown number on the ground.
Apartment buildings, small businesses and roadside shops were smashed to bricks and rubble Sunday when the Dana Air MD-83 plowed into the area about five miles short of Lagos' Murtala Muhammed International Airport.
Pilots on the flight from Nigeria's capital, Abuja, to its largest city of Lagos radioed the tower that they had engine trouble shortly before the crash, but the exact cause remained unclear. The weather was clear at the time.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan wept as he visited the Iju-Ishaga neighborhood, where a backhoe clawed at the debris looking for the dead.
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Jonathan pledged to make air travel safer, but the crash called into question the government's ability to protect its citizens and enforce regulations in a nation with a history of aviation disasters.
By nightfall, searchers with police dogs had recovered 137 bodies, including those of a mother cradling an infant, according to Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency. Rescuers acknowledged they still didn't know how many people died in the wrecked apartments and smaller tin-roofed buildings along the narrow streets of Iju-Ishaga.
"The fear is that since it happened in a residential area, there may have been many people killed," said Yushau Shuaib, a federal emergency management spokesman.
Lagos state, home to 17.5 million people, has grown rapidly in recent years. Massive migration and urban sprawl have brought neighborhoods to the boundaries of the airport.
Some U.S. citizens were aboard the flight, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, but he could not provide a firm number. Others killed in the crash included at least four Chinese citizens, two Lebanese nationals and one French citizen, officials said.
On April 19, 2010, the same plane made an emergency landing in Lagos because of a loss of engine power after a bird strike following takeoff, according to the Aviation Safety Network. The plane was exported to Nigeria in early 2009. It was first delivered in 1990 with the U.S. registration number N944AS to Alaska Airlines and had two minor incidents while in the Seattle-based airline's service, according to databases of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Aviation Safety Network.
