One hundred and five passengers and crew died today when an airliner crashed in the northern Nigerian city of Kano, while one passenger survived, hospital officials told reporters.
Officials at the Murtala Mohammed hospital in the city said that only one man, a brigadier-general in the Nigerian army, survived the crash. He is in a critical condition.
Witnesses at the scene of the crash earlier told reporters that 74 bodies had been recovered, and that dozens more people were thought to be trapped or dead in the rubble of destroyed homes.
Residents said that as the plane came into land, it hit a building in the heavily populated district of Gwammaja about one kilometre (half a mile) from the airport on the outskirts of Kano. It ploughed through two other buildings, came to a halt and then burst into flames, they said.
There is a massive mobilisation to evacuate residents of the area, a Gwammaja resident told reporters. Firefighters and rescue workers were on the scene, trying to pull survivors from the wreckage.
Rescue workers said because the crash occurred in a densely populated residential area, the casualty toll was likely to be higher than the number of passengers on board.
Air traffic controllers confirmed that the plane crashed as it was coming in to land but could not say at this stage what caused the disaster.
The last major Nigerian air crash occurred in November 1996, when a Nigerian Boeing 727 flying from Port Harcourt to Lagos crashed, killing all 142 passengers and nine crew members.
Nigeria deregulated its airline industry in the mid-1980s and many companies sprang up to challenge the monopoly of state carrier Nigeria Airways.
Concerns have been raised about the use of older aircraft used by the dozen or so local airline companies. Only last month the Nigerian government announced a ban on the use of aircraft older than 22 years, a move that triggered strong protests from private local airline operators.
The plane was owned by the privately owned Nigerian EAS Airlines, one of several airliners servicing the country's domestic air routes. Between October 1998 and December 1999, EAS took delivery of four BAC 1-11-500s.