Elie Hourani
Daily Star staff

Speaker Nabih Berri, who drove to Nabatieh Tuesday to pay his condolences to relatives of the victims of last week’s air crash, has called for arranging compensation to the victims.
Speaking to reporters during his visit to Nabatieh, Berri said that justice should take its course with respect to the disaster. “Nobody can hide the responsibility resulting from the disaster,” Berri said. He added that the government had so far handled the disaster well.
The speaker confirmed that the official inquiry into the air crash had not yet started. But he said that “women and children have perished and compensation should be paid.”
Berri, who was accompanied by his chief aide, Ahmad Baalbaki, and a delegation representing the Southern command of the Amal Movement, then went to the town’s mosque where he paid his last respects to the relatives of the victims, one by one.
On his arrival in Nabatieh, Berri visited the city’s cleric, Sheikh Abdel-Hussein Sadeq.
“We appreciate Speaker Berri’s visit aimed at sharing Nabatieh residents’ grief,” the cleric said in an address. He called on the authorities to “come up with the right answers,” regarding what went wrong in the fatal flight from Cotonou to Beirut last week.
Sadeq said that Nabatieh residents were shocked by the accident and needed something to soothe their pain.
Around 110 Lebanese are believed to have perished when a Boeing 727 aircraft crashed shortly after take-off in the Cotonou Airport in Benin.
Some reports have claimed that the plane was overloaded with both passengers and cargo, and could not fly high enough to avoid hitting a two-meter-high wall. The plane crashed into the sea next to the airport and most of the victims drowned after the aircraft broke-up on impact.
Up to 77 bodies were brought to Lebanon for burial. But some bodies have not been found yet, even after a team of army divers searched waters for survivors. The bodies of the dead were flown to Lebanon on board a French aircraft after the French government supplied metal coffins to transport the bodies.