No fewer than 157 peoples aboard an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 have died after the plane crashed en route from Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, to Nairobi, capital of Kenya.
Ethiopia’s state broadcaster said on Sunday that the 149 passengers and eight crew were of 33 nationalities.
“We hereby confirm that our scheduled flight ET 302 from Addis Ababa to Nairobi was involved in an accident today.
“It is believed that there were 149 passengers and eight crew on board the flight but we are currently confirming the details of the passenger manifest for the flight,” the statement read.
The plane took off at 8:38 a.m. (06:38 GMT) from Bole International Airport and “lost contact” six minutes later near Bishoftu, a town about 60km southeast of Addis Ababa by road.
The crashed airplane is of the new updated version of the Boeing 737.
In a tweet on Sunday, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, expressed his “condolences to the families of those that have lost their loved ones on Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 on regular scheduled flight to Nairobi, Kenya this morning.”
The Boeing 737-800MAX is the same type of plane as the Indonesian Lion Air jet that crashed in October 2018, 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.
The last major accident involving an Ethiopian Airlines passenger plane was a Boeing 737-800 that exploded after taking off from Lebanon in 2010, killing 83 passengers and seven crew.
