The plane disaster that claimed over 140 lives last week-end in Kano, Nigeria, is among the worst air accidents the country has ever experienced.
In 1992 a military plane went down near Lagos, killing 200 people, mostly officers on their way to a training course near the northern city of Zaria. Fifty-three people died in 1983 when a Nigeria Airways F-28 aircraft crashed near Enugu in the southeast; and another plane belonging to the state-run airways crashed near the northern town of Kaduna in 1995, killing seventy-five. The crash of the private plane of Ibrahim Abacha, the son of then-ruler General Sani Abacha, killed the young man and thirteen of his friends in 1996.
There have been over fifty air crashes since Nigeria became independent in 1960.