The scene of the Air Crash and some reaction

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (Reuters) - A Kenyan airliner crashed off Ivory Coast Sunday night (January 30, 2000) scattering corpses and wreckage in the sea, but rescuers and Kenya Airways said early on Monday that at least eight people survived. The Airbus 310, flight KQ431, was carrying 179 passengers and crew.The crash was Kenya Airways first and the first major airliner crash of the year. ``It broke up on impact. It broke into 100 pieces,'' medical worker Alain Thonar, who is attached to a private emergency service that works with the airport, told Reuters early on Monday, January 31.

"It's sad all those bodies floating everywhere,'' Gerard Frere, the owner of a fishing boat that took part in the rescue, said. Kenya Airways said that 169 passengers and 10 crew were on board. It too spoke of at least eight survivors. ``We are also getting reports of bodies washing up on the shore,'' Technical Director Steve Clark told a Nairobi news conference. Thonar traveled by helicopter to the crash site, about 3,000 meters from the shore. ``We were seeing bodies floating,'' he said. The sea was calm but there was no moon. Some witnesses reported hearing bangs as the plane went down. ``There were three loud explosions,'' Thonar said, quoting witnesses from the beach. Other witnesses spoke of seeing lights at the surface before the plane sank. ``There is wreckage and corpses scattered over a wide area,'' one source in contact with the rescue boats told Reuters. Two rescue helicopters with searchlights criss-crossed the scene. Rescuers quoted one survivor, a Nigerian, as saying that the plane had gone done three minutes after takeoff. Thonar said that the plane sent the control tower a radio message, saying that it was going down one minute after takeoff.

Rescue boats brought in at least seven survivors, at least one of them badly injured, and six corpses. ``They're due to go out again,'' the source in contact with the rescuers said. An ambulanceman said one survivor swam ashore. Rescue sources said kerosene on the corpses and the lack of a moon compounded the problems of trying to pull in bodies. ''We're having trouble pulling them in, it's awful.'' one rescuer said from the scene. The nationality of the dead and all but one of the survivors was not immediately clear. An Abidjan airport official said most of the passengers were Nigerians. ``The identity of those on board is one of the most difficult and sensitive matters we face after an incident like this,'' a senior official in Abidjan for the Dutch carrier KLM, which owns 26 percent of Kenya Airways, told Reuters, reading from a statement. ``The search is still going on.'' Rescuers searched for more than three hours after the crash, before they found the first sign of wreckage.

Hundreds of onlookers gathered on the beach. Several said that they had seen the plane come down. Some said that they had swum out the wreckage, but that looked less likely, given the distance of the wreckage from the shore. ``I heard the sound of takeoff and then the noise of the plane hitting the water,'' Andre Desson, a resident living nearby said. At Lagos airport, KLM officials said that the flight, which began from Kenya's capital Nairobi, had been due to land there before Abidjan but had overflown Nigeria because of the harmattan, a dusty seasonal wind from the deserts of north Africa.

Several dozen would-be passengers for the flight waited at Lagos international airport. ``This is terrible. I only thank God that this happened before I went on board,'' Nigerian trader Ndubuisi Akujurubo told Reuters there. Kenya Airways said Friday that it planned to invest over $750 million in the next five years, in part, to modernize its fleet. In a statement, it said that it would gradually replace its Airbus 310s with new Boeing B767-300 jets. By Alistair Thomson