Plane Crash:Distress at the Douala International Airport

Relatives, friends stream in to identify their victims

There have been distressing scenes at the Douala International Airport where a number of worried friends and relatives of the victims of the Kenyan airways plane Boeing 737-800 which crashed last Saturday have gathered. Family members from all the different countries which had passengers involved in the crash have been coming into Cameroon to identify their dead bodies. The family members have gone to Mbanga Pongo at the site of the crash. It is disheartening that their relatives they left a few hours back are discovered with no heads or hands. In some it is only the legs they found. The bodies of the victims are in a horrible state owing to the fact that the bodies were met in an advanced stage of decomposition. There are some corpses which have no hand or head. The passengers had been buried in the swamp as well as the aircraft it was not easy pulling them out of the mud. In some cases the rest of the body comes out but the arm cuts off and remains in the mud. It is a real pathetic and horrible scene.
Shortcomings
The, aircraft which off at 12:05 am and was later discovered on Sunday in a mangrove swamp at Mbanga Pongo, 12 miles from Douala Metropolis, has exposed a lot of short coming in the Cameroon government. Shortly after take-off, the plane reportedly sent a distress signal while flying over the dense forest region in the South Province of Cameroon. After that nothing more was heard from its pilots. The whole nation and the world were misled as it was insinuated the plane must have fallen around Lolodorf, in the South of Cameroon. May be it is because the last signals of the plane were received when the plane was flying over the dense forest of the South. Search teams all rushed to Lolodorf and there were no signs of a fallen plane. It was only on Sunday when a hunter discovered debris of the aircraft that the news got to the authorities. Even then assistance came from the French who assisted with a helicopter they brought in from Gabon to assist in the search. This took a lot of time to discover the aircraft. A situation the CEO of Kenyan airways Titus Nakuini said was because the terrain was difficult as well as the Spokesman for the Kenyan government Alfred Mutua who said the area was not well covered by radar so it was difficult to trace the plane’s flight path. According to Littoral Governor, Gounoko Haounaye, who visited the marshy mangroves area where the plane had crashed, on Sunday, he told reporters that the plane had been stuck deep into mud and due to darkness and lack of adequate equipments, they could not determine much.
A Lost to MTN Cameroon
The crash claimed lives of personalities. Among which were the MTN Cameroon Director Campbell Utton, the Financial Director Sarah Stewart and her husband Adam Stewart, MTN’s head of legal affair unit Patrick Njamfa and Joseph Patrice Essombo Enam an MTN engineer who was travelling for a training course. There was also Anthony Mitchell, a respected and well-known Associated Press journalist based in Nairobi. A Cameroonian Lawyer based in Arusha among others. As of now the cause of the crash besides poor weather, has not been known. But it was argued it could not have been a technical hitch because the plane was equipped with an emergency transmitter that sends out an automatic locator signal in the event of a rapid change in velocity. Now that one of the black boxes has been fond it would better clear out doubts.

EFFA TAMBENKONGHO