It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
(visit the link for the full news article)
NAIROBI, Kenya - Kenya Airways has lost contact with a commercial airliner carrying more than 100 passengers that took off from Cameroon early Saturday, the airline said. "The last message was received in Douala after takeoff and thereafter the tower was unable to contact the plane," Kenya Airways CEO Titus Naikuni said Saturday. The Boeing 737-800 was carrying 106 passengers, eight crew members and a flight engineer.
A Kenya Airways plane with 115 people on board has crashed in southern Cameroon, near the town of Niete, Cameroon state radio reports.
Alex Bayeck, a regional communications officer, said the Nairobi-bound jet went down near the town of Lolodorf, about 155 miles south of the coastal city of Douala, where it had taken off shortly after midnight.
There was no word on survivors, said Bayeck, who spoke via telephone while en route to the crash site by car. Kenya Airways CEO Titus Naikuni, speaking in Nairobi earlier, said that Kenya Air had not yet been officially informed that the plane had crashed, but that it was missing.
Relatives waiting at Nairobi's airport began wailing as reports of the crash filtered in. Dozens of family members cried and collapsed in the airport terminal.
A top government official told AFP: "We have located the plane ... and we cannot talk about it."
YAOUNDE (Reuters) - Teams of rescuers and villagers combed thick tropical forest in southern Cameroon on Sunday for the wreckage of a Kenya Airways passenger plane which crashed after takeoff in the central African country, officials said. The Boeing 737-800 aircraft, which was carrying 114 people from more than 20 countries, went missing on Saturday after leaving Douala airport bound for Nairobi in torrential rain. It was reported to have come down in thick jungle. Military helicopters backed up by villagers on motorbikes had searched a swathe of the forest-covered terrain southwest of the capital Yaounde on Saturday. But they failed to locate the plane, which initially set off from Ivory Coast, before darkness fell.
'No survivors' in Cameroon crash
Worried friends and relatives have been waiting for news
A Kenya Airways plane that crashed in Cameroon on Saturday has been found submerged in a swamp and there is no chance of any survivors, officials say.
"There are no chances that there will be any survivors because almost the entire body of the plane was buried inside the swamp," Jean-Pierre Nana, director of Cameroon's civil protection department and a member of a crisis working group set up by the prime minister, told Reuters. The passengers and crew hailed from 27 nations.
Early on Monday, rescuers battled through swamps and thick forest to reach the wreckage after parts of the aircraft were found late on Sunday in a swamp, and locals reported making grim discoveries in the thick bush.
I saw one body and one arm," resident Guiffo Gande told reporters in Mbanga Pongo village, an area of dense mangrove swamps some 20 km (12.4 miles) east of Douala.