RIP
Hundreds of people mourned on Monday at a cemetery in the Equatorial Guinea capital of Malabo as most of the 60 known victims of a fiery weekend plane crash were buried in a common grave.
The coffins carrying the remains of 57 of the 60 official victims - who could not be identified as their bodies were burned or dismembered beyond recognition in Saturday's crash - were placed side by side in the vast mass grave.
The three bodies officially identified were returned to the victims' families for burial in their respective villages, hospital officials in Malabo said.
'We weren't able to identify my nephew, but I know he was on board'
An overloaded Russian-built Antonov-24 passenger plane, carrying at least 60 people despite its maximum capacity of 48 passengers and four crew members, crashed in flames shortly after take-off from Malabo, in a dense jungle area.
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema said on Sunday there were 60 people on board the plane, but an airport official said there may have been as many as 80 people crowded on the plane, some of whom could have bribed their way aboard.
Obiang said the victims were mostly young people and women. The radio confirmed many were Malabo college students leaving the island of Bioko where the capital is situated for home on the central African mainland.
The funeral officially ended operations to identify the bodies of Saturday's crash, leaving many relatives not knowing whether they had buried their loved ones.
"We weren't able to identify my nephew, but I know he was on board," said Juan, a civil servant in his 50s seated among other families at the cemetery.
'We don't have the necessary means to decode the black boxes'
Small bouquets of wilted flowers placed on the wooden coffins could not mask the odour of decaying flesh that permeated the air.
Rescue workers were unable to reach the wreckage for about a day, and the damage was so devastating that it was unlikely anybody will ever know for sure just how many people were on the plane.
The Soviet-era aircraft was operated by the company Ecuatorial Express Airlines, known as Ecuatair.
Ecuatair, owned by a Kazakh businessman, is among a handful of companies serving domestic African routes on planes that no longer meet international flight standards and are banned from landing at airports in other countries in the region.
Most such planes are piloted mainly by Russians, Ukrainians and Armenians and crews in Equatorial Guinea, a small former Spanish colony, are often bribed to carry extra passengers, airport sources said.
At the funeral site three bulldozers and dump trucks were brought in to help with the excavation.
Despite their urgency to get the bodies buried as quickly as possible, grave diggers attempted to sculpt small walls in the mass grave to separate the coffins.
Rescue workers at the crash site, where pieces of plane and bodies were strewn over a wide area, found the Antonov's two orange "black box" flight recorders but no trace of survivors.
The black boxes were taken initially to the hospital late on Sunday, and then were picked up by men who had arrived in a vehicle dispatched by the president's office.
"Here we don't have the necessary means to decode the black boxes so we're going to call on foreign experts," Second Deputy Prime Minister Richardo Mangue Omaba Nfubea said.
A presidential decree said flags would be flown at half-mast during the three-day national mourning period, which started at midnight on Sunday (23h00 GMT).
Equatorial Guinea, with a population of just over one million, is in the midst of an oil boom, and has seen double-digit growth since the mid-1990s. - Sapa-AFP