7 SA passport holders on flight

2007-05-08 10:14

Johannesburg - Only seven South Africans were on board the aircraft that crashed in Cameroon at the weekend, Kenyan Airways said on Tuesday.

"There were no more than seven South Africans," said Kenya Airways spokesperson Glenn Lewington.

Lewington said 19 people on board flight KQ 507 were connecting into Johannesburg and "that's were the confusion is coming from".

Lewington said the airline categorised South Africans as those travelling with South African passports.

The French news agency AFP reported that one of the two black boxes from the plane was found late on Monday at the crash site.

Found in the mud

"We found the flight data recorder. We still need to recover the cockpit flight recorder," said civil aviation director general Ignatius Sana Juma.

He added that the black box was found in the mud in the debris of the aircraft whose impact had created a large crater in a mangrove swamp near Mbanga-Pongo, southeast of the Douala airport from where the Boeing 737-800 took off early on Saturday on a flight heading to Nairobi.

All 114 people on board died in the crash.

The black box would be examined by aviation experts as part of the investigation into what caused the crash, Juma said.

Search operations at the crash site were set to resume early on Tuesday.

The Boeing 737-800 aircraft left Douala in Cameroon at five minutes past midnight on Saturday, but never reached Nairobi in Kenya.

The last message from the aircraft was received by the Douala control tower immediately after take-off.

The wreckage of the plane was found 10 minutes' flight outside Douala on Sunday.

- SAPA