A Kenya Airways plane that went missing on Saturday with 114 people on board crashed in a swamp a short distance from Cameroon’s Douala airport, officials said on Sunday. There has been no word of any survivors.The Boeing 737-800, which was carrying passengers from more than 20 countries, vanished shortly after taking off from Douala for Nairobi in torrential rain. The plane’s wreckage was found 20 kilometres southeast of the airport along the plane’s flight path, Kenya Airways said. “All I can say for now is that the wreckage of the plane has been located in the small village of Mbanga Pongo, in the Douala III subdivision. We are currently enacting several rescue measures,” Cameroon’s Minister of State for Territorial Administration Hamidou Yaya Marafa said at a news conference. “For now we cannot say whether there were any survivors or not. Access to the area is very difficult,” he said. “We are beginning a new painful phase. Our task will be more difficult now and may involve recovering the corpses of the passengers.”
An aviation official said a ground team was at the site and a search party was trying to reach the area by helicopter. The plane was found more than 100 km from the zone where radar-equipped helicopters, ground search parties and villagers on motorbikes had spent much of the weekend combing thick tropical forest.