Death toll in Nigerian plane crash up to 107, mostly children

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria -- Four people died after being pulled from the wreckage of a Nigerian jetliner that crashed while landing in a storm, state television said Sunday, raising the number killed to 107, most of them schoolchildren coming home for Christmas.\nThe victims included an American aid worker.\nAirport officials directed frantic family members to morgues in this southern oil center as a Roman Catholic cleric in Abuja said 71 schoolchildren from that city's Jesuit school died in Saturday's crash of the Sosoliso Airlines DC-9.\nAt one overwhelmed hospital, bodies were piled together because of a lack of room.\nRescue workers pulled seven survivors from the burning aircraft, but state television reported that four later died. The plane's twisted, charred wreckage lay in two parts as investigators picked through the pieces.\nPresident Olusegun Obasanjo canceled a visit to Portugal and said he would meet with the country's airline operators to discuss "much-needed reforms in Nigeria's aviation industry," presidential spokeswoman Remi Oyo said in a statement. The crash was the second major air disaster in seven weeks in Africa's most populous nation.\n"The president is particularly saddened by the untimely and abrupt termination of the lives of many young schoolchildren," Oyo said.\nThe cleric in Abuja, John Onaiyekan, said 71 schoolchildren from the city's Ignatius Loyola Jesuit College died in the crash. Four others got off the plane when it made a scheduled stopover in another city, he said.\nParis-based aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres said two of its international employees were among the dead: a French national and an American.\nA top aviation ministry official, Tommy Oyelade, said investigators had recovered the plane's flight data recorders, or "black boxes," but the cause of the crash was not yet known.\nSam Adurogboye, spokesman for the National Civil Aviation Authority, said the weather was stormy at the time of the crash, and witnesses said they saw lightning as the plane approached the runway carrying 103 passengers and seven crew members.