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Lagos, Nigeria (CNN) — Nigerian authorities have recovered the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder from the deadly weekend plane crash in Lagos, emergency officials said Tuesday.
The devices will help investigators piece together what caused the Sunday crash that killed at least 153 people aboard and at least 10 people on the ground.
So far, rescue crews have recovered 137 bodies, including that of a woman clutching a baby, from the crash site.
But heavy rains Tuesday prompted a suspension of further recovery efforts, officials said.
The Dana Air plane crashed into a densely populated neighborhood in Lagos on Sunday night slamming into a two-story residential building.
“The wall of the building, the plane pushed the wall of our building in, and it hit everything,” said Kingsley Okeke, who was in the building. “There was fire everywhere.”
‘No survivors’ in Nigerian plane crash
Map shows location of crash
Map shows location of crash
Lagos witness: ‘Plane was still burning’
Video shows plane still smoldering
The pilot declared an emergency as the plane was on final approach to Murtala Muhammed International Airport, and witnesses said it appeared the plane was having engine trouble, said Oscar Wason, Dana Air’s director of operations.
Wason identified the pilot as an American, but did not release his name or hometown. The co-pilot was from India, and the flight engineer from Indonesia, Wason said.
U.S. citizens were on board the flight, the U.S. State Department said Monday, but the agency did not have an exact number. The consulate in Lagos was working to notify the victims’ next of kin, spokesman Mark Toner said.
Sisters Jennifer and Josephine Onita of Missouri City, Texas, were among those killed in the crash, the Houston Chronicle reported. They traveled to Lagos to attend a wedding.
Jennifer Onita, 28, recently worked in aeronautics engineering for a NASA contractor and was a graduate student at the University of Houston, the paper reported. Josephine Onita, 23, managed all five locations of the family’s financial planning at tax services business, the Chronicle said.
Also among the dead are six Chinese citizens who were on board the flight, the Chinese Embassy in Nigeria said Monday.
According to witnesses, the passenger plane appeared to be coming in high with its nose up when it crashed, hitting the ground tail first, Wason said.
The flight, coming from the Nigerian capital of Abuja, crashed at 3:43 p.m. (10:43 a.m. ET) Sunday in the neighborhood of Iju Ishaga, just north of the airport, according to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority.
The crash site was 11 miles (18 kilometers) from the runway, Wason said.
An airliner carrying 153 people crashes on Sunday, June 3, in a residential neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria’s most populated city. There were no survivors.
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Photos: Recent major plane crashes
The airplane was 22 years old and was purchased from Alaska Airlines. It underwent a routine maintenance checkup every 200 hours, and it had just been inspected three days earlier, Wason said.
The Nigerian aviation authority has not asked Dana Air to ground its planes, though the airline canceled all its flights Monday as show of respect for the victims of the crash, he said.
Dana Air, which is privately owned and based in Lagos, began operations in 2008.
Lagos, with a population of more than 7.9 million people, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. It is Nigeria’s commercial hub.
