Relatives of more than 100 people who died in a plane crash in Nigeria on Saturday have been gathering at mortuaries to try to identify victims. Most of those killed when the plane came down in bad weather near Port Harcourt airport were children.

Investigators have begun sifting through the wreckage and analysing the aircraft's black box. President Olusegun Obasanjo is to hold an emergency meeting with aviation officials to review air safety.

'So much suffering'

Clutching photographs, family members walked past badly burnt bodies laid out on the mortuary floor, at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital. The bodies, which were still identifiable, had been sprinkled with disinfectant and tagged with numbers, in a room with no refrigeration or air-conditioning.

"All we can do now is bury our dead and mourn," one man, among hundreds of wailing relatives at the mortuary, told news agency Reuters. "There is so much suffering here." The DC-9 was travelling from the capital Abuja when it overshot the runway at Port Harcourt during an electrical storm and burst into flames.

The victims include some 75 school children and a French and a US national working for aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres. The privately-run Sosoliso Airlines, which owned the plane, went into operation as a domestic airline in 2000 and now flies to six Nigerian cities.

The president, said to be deeply saddened by the accident, has cancelled a visit to Portugal to deal with the air disaster, Nigeria's second in less than two months, and review air traffic safety. Correspondents say several Nigerian airports have come under criticism in recent months following a string of accidents and near-misses.

A Boeing 737 aircraft crashed in October shortly after take-off from the commercial capital Lagos, killing all 117 people on board. The flight recorders from that plane were never found. President Olusegun Obasanjo had instructed his aviation minister to plug any loopholes to ensure airline safety.

| BBC |

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