Nigeria: Car breaks through gates at airport, crashes into 737 aircraft

Nigeria: Car crashes into 737 aircraft

LAGOS, Nigeria — A man crashed his car through security gates and into a parked commercial aircraft at a Nigerian airport Wednesday, marking the latest airport security breach in a country where the attempted Christmas Day airline bomber apparently managed to get by screening.

The man slammed an aging Audi sedan through two sets of gates guarded by the Nigerian Air Force at Margaret Ekpo International Airport in Calabar, a city near the country’s eastern border with Cameroon, federal aviation spokesman Akin Olukunle said.

The car then rammed into a Boeing 737 operated by Arik Air, Nigeria’s top commercial airline.

The aircraft was empty at the time of the collision and no one was injured, Olukunle said, though local newspapers claimed passengers for the plane’s Abuja-bound flight already were boarding.

A photograph of the car published online by the Nigerian newspaper NEXT showed it wedged underneath the belly of the aircraft, its front bumper hanging off.

Olukunle said he had no information about the man, who was immediately arrested and is in Air Force custody. A local police bomb squad found no traces of explosives in the car, he said.

Edet Okon Asim, a spokesman for the local Cross Rivers state government, said investigators were trying to understand the man’s motives.

“The man I saw in there was behaving like an insane person,” he said.

Officials with Arik Air could not be reached Wednesday night.

International airports in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, and the megacity of Lagos have fences and guards keeping people off the airfield, but things often are different at the nation’s outlying airfields. Livestock occasionally grazes across airstrips and the airport in Port Harcourt, the heart of the oil-rich Niger Delta, had malfunctioning runway lights as recently as last month.

Security remains concern at Nigerian airports after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, apparently passed through Lagos’ international airport with explosives hidden on his body. The federal government instituted pat-downs on all international travelers and stricter screenings, but some worry the endemic corruption that grips Africa’s most populous nation could thwart those efforts.