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AGONY AND TEARS
Relatives mourn Kenya air crash victims

By Alexandra Zavis

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast: They met in high school. After dating for seven years, he finally proposed. She accepted. And then she was gone. Shamira Mohamed, 24, was a flight attendant on Kenya Airways Flight 431, which slammed into the Atlantic just moments after takeoff Sunday from this tropical port city. For her fiance, Mohamed Waseem, news of the crash was just the start of the agony. "Up to now we don't know if she is alive or dead, if the body has been found, nothing," Waseem said Wednesday (January 2, 2000) as he shakily lit a cigarette upon arrival at Abidjan's international airport from Nairobi, Kenya. The Airbus 310 was carrying 179 people destined for Lagos, Nigeria, when it tumbled from the sky. Only 10 survivors were found and 86 bodies retrieved.

Ivorian and French teams have located both the plane's "black boxes" &endash; the flight data and cockpit voice recorder &endash; off the coast, said Laurent Kako, the Ivorian aviation official in charge of the investigation. Searchers were preparing for a recovery operation, he said. Dazed and exhausted, 150 relatives of the dead and missing staggered off a Kenya Airways flight Wednesday from Nairobi and Lagos hoping to confirm the fate of their loved ones and bring their bodies home. One woman dressed in black collapsed into the arms of her waiting relatives and burst into tears. "Her mother and son were on the flight," said Petra Kaumi, wiping away tears of her own as she consoled her Kenyan cousin. "The mother's body has been found, but we are still looking for the boy."

The airline had buses ready to transport the families to the luxury Hotel Ivoire, where they will stay until missing relatives have been identified. There, they waited in line at a reception center to fill out forms and hand over snapshots to help officials identify bodies.

Others, tired of waiting, went to the city's main morgue themselves hoping to locate friends and relatives. They waited for hours there, too, while officials performed autopsies and completed paperwork. Razak Ismail, a Nigerian, spent the entire day there Tuesday and was back again Wednesday with his brother hoping to locate the body of his sister-in-law. "We are Muslims. We need to bury her," he said, referring to the religious stipulation that the dead be buried within 24 hours.

Morgue head Albert Zeze explained there were only three doctors available to conduct the autopsies. By Wednesday afternoon, just 26 of the recovered bodies had been identified. Relatives also decried delays in the rescue operation. Some of the 10 survivors clung to bits of wreckage for hours before they were rescued, and at least one swam to shore. Many were saved by volunteers trawling the waters in their own boats. In contrast, when an Alaska Airlines jetliner went down off the coast of California on Monday, dozens of Coast Guard, Navy and private ships arrived immediately, but found no survivors. In Abidjan, many relatives knew nothing about counselors, manifests or crisis centers. They were available, but no one told them. "In Africa, we're so unfortunate," said Raliatou Atanda, an Ivorian who returned three times to the morgue to look for his niece. "Even the rescue operation was hampered by a lack of resources. I'm sure more people could have been saved."

Ivorian officials defended their response, while acknowledging the seaside airport had no rescue boats on hand. They also pointed out the accident happened at night, and on a Sunday. "But I was informed and (rescuers) went to the site as soon as possible," said the director of the Ivorian civil aviation authority, Jean Kouassi Abonouan. For Waseem, however, explanations were not a priority. He just wants to be able to bury his fiance. "She was very bubbly, never liked to stay at home," he remembered. "The only reason I agreed to wait two years to marry her is because this was her dream job. And she is gone."
© Copyright 2000. The Associated Press