KEY POINTS:
MBANGA PONGO, Cameroon - Rescue workers in Cameroon pulled remains of victims from a fetid swamp overnight, two days after a Kenya Airways plane crashed, killing all 114 people on board.
The Boeing 737-800 fell into densely forested swampland early on Saturday, minutes after leaving Douala for Nairobi in torrential rain. Rescuers said they had found one of two "black box" recorders which may shed light on the cause of the crash.
"It's devastating. I found one or two whole bodies at the start, but since then everything is in pieces," said Captain Francis Ekosso of Cameroon's fire department, who was in charge of the rescue operation.
"People were afraid of the bodies at the start, so I had to pick them up with my own hands, and they came apart in my fingers," he said.
The plane was found late on Sunday in a mangrove swamp near Mbanga Pongo, around 20 km from Douala airport.
In a round crater gouged out of the bush, victims' remains lay amid clothes, personal belongings and plane debris in a hole filled with muddy water smelling of jet fuel and decomposition.
Rescue workers used a mobile generator to pump away water to expose more of the wreckage, and retrieved one of the plane's black box recorders, said Celeste Mandeng, of Cameroon's Civil Protection Service.
He was unable to specify whether it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice register which had been recovered.
Apart from the plane's nose jammed into the mud, there was little left of the rest of the aircraft except fragments little bigger than a car door.
Rescue workers had to hack through dense mangrove and forest to reach the wreckage as helicopters and planes buzzed overhead.
They then returned the several kilometres to the nearest road carrying stretchers bearing victims' remains wrapped in white plastic.
Kamal Shah, a 32-year-old Kenyan who flew out from Nairobi after the crash, searched through the wreckage in silence for any signs of his wife, Meera Shah, 30. She had been on her way home from a short business trip, he said.
The wreckage was located after nearly two days of fruitless searches well over 100 km away in southern Cameroon, where radar-equipped helicopters and villagers on motorbikes spent most of the weekend combing tropical forest.
Mandeng said early search efforts had mistakenly focused on an area much further south based on information received from a satellite tracking centre in Spain.
"The experts will check what has happened," he told Reuters.
The crash has again thrown the spotlight on air safety in Africa, the continent with the world's worst record.
It dealt a severe blow to the image of Kenya Airways, one of the most successful and modern companies in the east African nation. The airline is listed on three East African bourses and is 26 per cent owned by Air France's Dutch arm KLM.
The six-month-old aircraft was carrying 105 passengers and nine crew from 27 nations, mostly African, with others from China, India, Europe and elsewhere.
As soon as the plane disappeared, questions were asked about why a jet less than a year old would have crashed.
The flight had originated in Ivory Coast, where a Kenya Airways Airbus A-310 plunged into the sea moments after takeoff in January 2000, killing all but 10 of the 179 people on board.
- REUTERS
