TRIPOLI, Libya: A Libyan plane carrying 104 people crashed Wednesday on approach to Tripoli’s airport, leaving a field scattered with smoldering debris that included a large chunk of the tail painted with the airline’s brightly colored logo. A 10-year-old Dutch boy was the only known survivor.
The Dutch prime minister said everyone on the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330-200 arriving from Johannesburg, South Africa was killed except the boy, who was undergoing surgery. However, Libyan officials only confirmed that 96 bodies had been found and said rescuers were searching for the rest of the victims.
The Royal Dutch Tourism Board said 61 of the dead came from the Netherlands.
"This is a large group of Dutch nationals after all, so it’s a deeply sad message we have this day," Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said.
Libyan state television showed a large field scattered with small and large pieces of plane debris and dozens of police and rescue workers with surgical masks and gloves, some of them carrying at least one body away. They gathered small personal items such as wallets and cell phones from the wreckage.
Others sifted through debris — some of it still smoldering — including a flight recorder and green seats with television screens on them. A large piece of the plane’s tail was visible, bearing Afriqiyah’s brightly colored logo with the numbers "9.9.99," a reference to the date of the founding of the African Union.
The plane was carrying 93 passengers and 11 crew.
"Afriqiyah Airways announces that our flight 771 had an accident during landing at Tripoli International airport," the statement said. "At this moment, we have no information concerning possible casualties or survivors. Our information is that there were 93 passenger and 11 crew aboard. Authorities are conducting the search and rescue mission."
Libyan Transport Minister Mohamed Ali Zaidan said 96 bodies have been recovered from the wreckage and rescuers were searching for the rest of the victims. Libya’s official JANA news agency quoted him as saying a Dutch boy has survived the crash, but did not say anything about his condition.
The plane was approaching the airport in the Libyan capital Tripoli when it crashed at around 6 a.m. (0400 GMT). There was no immediate word on the cause, according to a statement by the airlines posted on its website.
Afriqiyah said flight 771 left Johannesburg at 1 am Wednesday (2300 GMT Tuesday).
The airlines later issued a second statement saying a search-and-rescue operation at the crash site "has now been completed and casualties have been moved to various hospitals."
It said Tripoli was the flight’s final destination.
Weather conditions over Tripoli’s international airport were good on Wednesday, with 4.8-kilometer visibility, scattered clouds at 10,000 feet and winds of only three miles per hour.
A NASA Web site said an ash cloud from Iceland’s volcano had reached North Africa by Monday, but a map from Britain’s meteorological office showed it was well west of Tripoli at the time of the crash.
Brussels-based European air traffic management agency said the thinning volcanic ash cloud that disrupted air traffic over parts of Europe and the Atlantic in the past few days had moved into mid-ocean and was unlikely to have affected an airliner in Libya, more than 3,200 kilometers to the west.
Daniel Hoeltgen, spokesman for the European Aviation Safety Agency said Afriqiyah has undergone 10 recent safety inspections at European airports, with no significant safety findings. He said a team of French crash investigators was already on its way to Tripoli.
"We are currently talking to Airbus and with the French accident investigator BEA, which will be involved in the investigation," said Hoeltgen. "We will lend our support if this is required by authorities in charge."
Afriqiyah Airways is not included on the European Union’s list of banned airlines. The list has nearly 300 carriers deemed by the EU not to meet international safety standards.
According to initial reports, the plane crashed as it neared the threshold of Tripoli International’s main east-west runway, while preparing to touch down from the east.
The main runway at Tripoli Airport is 3,600 meters long. According to international airport guides, the airport does not have a precision approach system that guides airplanes down to the runway’s threshold, but has two other less sophisticated systems that are in wide use throughout the world.
Wednesday’s crash was the fourth deadly landing accident at Tripoli airport in the past 40 years, according to the Web site of the U.S.-based Flight Safety Foundation.
In 1970, a Czechoslovak Airlines Tupolev 104 crashed 5.5 kilometers from the airport, killing all 13 people on board. A year later, a United Arab Airlines Comet crashed 7 kilometers from the runway threshold, killing all 16 on board. In 1989, a Korean Air DC-10 crashed, killing 75 of the 199 people on the aircraft.
Afriqiyah Airways operates an all Airbus fleet. It was founded in April 2001 and is fully owned by the Libyan government. –Associated Press reporters Slobodan Lekic in Brussels, Salah Nasrawi in Cairo, Toby Sterling in Amsterdam, Donna Bryson in Johannesburg, South Africa, and David Rising in Berlin contributed to this report.
