Rescue officials in Nigeria said Wednesday they have ended their search for bodies in the site where an airliner crashed into a densely populated area, killing all 153 people aboard the plane and a still-unknown number of people on the ground. Workers cleared away the remaining pieces of the wreckage of the MD-83 aircraft Wednesday from Iju-Ishaga, the Lagos neighborhood about nine kilometers (five miles) from Lagos' Murtala Muhammed International Airport where the Dana Air flight went down on Sunday. Emergency workers there have recovered 153 complete corpses as well as fragmented remains, said Yushau Shuaib, a spokesman for Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency. It is unclear if the fragmented remains represent less than a dozen victims, or dozens. Officials now plan to survey the neighborhood to find who remains missing after the plane smashed into two apartment buildings, a printing business and a woodshop, Shuaib said. Authorities have discussed using DNA to identify the dead. Samples would have to be sent abroad for testing. The cause of the crash on a sunny, clear Sunday afternoon remains unclear. The crew radioed the tower that they had engine trouble shortly before the plane went down. Authorities already have collected the flight voice and data recorders and plan to send them abroad for analysis, according to a report of the Associated Press.
