Plane Carrying 114 Missing in Nigeria

Oct 23, 12:58 AM (ET)

By DULUE MBACHU

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - Military helicopters searched in vain for a missing plane that was carrying at least 114 people when it disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from Nigeria's biggest city, officials said Sunday.

The Boeing 737 aircraft, operated by Nigerian-run Bellview Airlines, lost contact with the control tower five minutes after taking off from the Lagos airport at 8:45 p.m. on Saturday, said Jide Ibinola, a spokesman for the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria. It was headed to the capital, Abuja, on a 50-minute flight.

Pilots issued a distress call before the plane disappeared from radar about 15 miles west of Lagos over the Atlantic Ocean, state television reported.

Airport officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press, said they believed the plane had crashed, although there was no confirmation of that.

Ibinola said military choppers dispatched to search for the aircraft failed to find it and returned to their base.

"They will go out again as soon as it's daylight to see if the plane can be located," he said.

Those aboard included at least 108 passengers and six crew, Ibinola said. Their nationalities were not immediately known.

On its Web site, CNN news said Nigerian aviation authorities had confirmed that the plane had crashed. But officials speaking to The Associated Press would not confirm this.

Most aircraft take off from Lagos, Nigeria's biggest city, in the direction of the Atlantic, and turn back toward the coast.

"We still don't have any concrete information of what became of the plane," Ibinola said. "We've tried from neighboring countries to see if the plane landed there but there's no such information."

No other details were immediately available.

Bellview is a privately owned Nigerian airline that mostly operates a fleet of mostly Boeing 737s on internal routes and throughout West Africa. Bellview's first began flying about 10 years ago and has not suffered a crash before.

There was no word on whether the incident was terrorist-related.

Nigeria has never come under international terror attack, but the United States closed its consulate in Lagos for two days in June after what officials said was a phoned-in terror threat.

Nigeria, with a population of 130 million people, is roughly split between a mainly Muslim north and a Christian-dominated south and sectarian violence has broken out sporadically.

In 2002, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network claimed responsibility an attempt to shoot down an Israeli charter airliner in Kenya with shoulder-fired missiles.