Nigerian Crash Toll Rises after Ground Deaths Confirmed

Nigerian rescuers have confirmed the first deaths on the ground following a devastating plane crash in the country's largest city of Lagos, raising the death toll to at least 157, an official said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, rains hampered efforts at the scene of the devastation early Tuesday, with fears that the ruins of a two-storey residential building would collapse.

A crane readied to pull down the building, according to rescuers, while residents who survived were being allowed onto the site to salvage property, including one who spoke of a narrow escape for himself and two others.

"Two of us were in the living room about to watch the Nigeria-Namibia match when we heard a loud bang and parts of the walls started falling," said Colins Onyegesi, 24-year-old geology graduate, as he hauled away a refrigerator with his brother.

"I thought it was a bomb attack by (Islamist group) Boko Haram. We rushed to our room to rescue our sister, who was sleeping."

They then ran, with their flat in a part of the building with less damage, while seeing fire and destruction as they fled.

The toll rose after four people were confirmed dead from the residential building in the neighborhood where the Dana Air MD83 crashed on Sunday afternoon in addition to the 153 crew and passengers, a rescue official said.

The official said the four people confirmed dead from the building included a couple as well as a woman clutching her daughter.

"A couple died while their children survived, then a woman and her daughter," the official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to provide figures.

According to the official, 146 bodies had been recovered so far.

The number of deaths could rise further as searches continue at the site near the airport, particularly amid the ruins of the building.

The victims include a number of foreigners, including six Chinese, an Indian, a French citizen and an unclear number of Americans. The pilot was an American and the co-pilot was Indian, the country's civil aviation chief has said.

The spokesman for Nigerian state oil firm NNPC was also reportedly among the dead.

The plane, traveling from the capital Abuja to Lagos, had reported both of its engines having failed before it went down, according to the civil aviation chief.

"They declared mayday," Harold Demuren told Agence France Presse. "The reason was that the two engines failed."

The plane destroyed a warehouse used to store textbooks, an adjacent duplex house and a church, and ploughed into the two-story residential building, which had four to five flats per floor.

"For now, nobody can estimate the number of corpses still lying there," Sam Udo Onyemachi of Nigeria's Security and Civil Defense Corps told AFP, standing on the fringes of the crash site on Monday.

President Goodluck Jonathan visited the crash scene on Monday and pledged to improve the country's patchy air safety record as questions swirled over what caused the accident of the 22-year-old plane.

Families gathered outside a morgue at a Lagos hospital on Monday, hoping to identify relatives, including one man holding a picture of his wife.

Local media reported that the crash was Nigeria's worst since 1992, when a military C-130 went down after takeoff in Lagos, killing around 200 people on board.

There have been a number of other crashes with more than 100 victims over the past decade in Nigeria but the most recent was in 2005.

The flight disappeared from radar screens on Sunday one minute after declaring the emergency at 3:43 pm local time (14:43 GMT), 11 nautical miles from the airport, a statement from the aviation ministry said.

Dana, which began operating in 2008, issued a statement specifying that the plane was carrying 146 passengers and seven crew.

It said the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority was leading the investigation and would be assisted by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

At least one of the plane's two cockpit recorders had been recovered, officials said.