The Houston Chronicle
November 26, 1996

MORONI, Comoros Islands -Rescue workers dragged a chunk of an Ethiopian airplane fuselage onto the beach Monday and used electric saws to cut bodies from the jet, which crashed when hijackers let it run out of fuel.

The workers hauled the bodies to a makeshift morgue set up in a former warehouse.

Four of the 52 people who initially survived Saturday's crash died from their injuries, bringing the death toll to 127. At least 101 sets of remains have been recovered, but authorities were having trouble identifying some of them.

Of the 163 passengers and 12 crew on board the plane, 145 were international travelers from some 35 countries and 30 were Ethiopians.

At least one U.S. citizen was among the dead. Leslianne Shedd, 28, was a commercial officer with the Foreign Service, and had been headed to Kenya to meet friends for Thanksgiving.

Among the missing was Ron Ferris, a missionary doctor from Tennessee who according to his father had given up ""a six-figure salary to help Africans for $ 800 a month. ''

Two men were arrested as suspects in the hijacking. but they may have been wrongly identified. The plane's co-pilot, Yonas Mekuria, told police he did not recognize the suspects as any of the three hijackers who had refused to let the plane land to refuel.

If the two arrested men are determined to have been passengers, it would mean all the hijackers died, government spokesman Dgouma Ibrahim said.

Police said several more bodies were trapped in wreckage still submerged a few hundreds yards off Grand Comore, the largest of the three Comoros Islands.

Flight 961 had just left the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa en route to the Ivory Coast when the three hijackers stormed the cockpit and demanded to be taken to Australia. Their motive remains unclear.

The pilot told them the Boeing 767 was running out of fuel and pleaded with the hijackers to let him land at an airport in Moroni, the capital of these islands east of Mozambique. But they refused.

""They said, 'If we die, we want others to die with us. We want to make history,' '' according to Indian passenger Rekha Mirchandani, 29, who said crew members gave her the account before she was flown to a hospital in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.

The pilot crash-landed the jet in the sea near the shore, where rescuers were able to reach the wreckage quickly. The body of the plane slammed into the water, bouncing and flipping at least once before it broke apart.

Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's flagship carrier, made preparations Monday for a mass repatriation of the victims to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, but their efforts were hindered by a lack of coffins on the Muslim island-chain.

""The problem we have is that we have no coffins in the Comoros. We are a Muslim country,'' the Commander of Comoran police, Ismael Mognidaho, said. Muslims bury their dead in shrouds instead of coffins.

Shedd, the American who was killed, had been stationed in Addis Ababa as a commercial officer helping U.S. companies doing business in the region. Her parents live in Gig Harbor, Wash.

Ferris, 46, had been returning from India to Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast. His wife, Anita, and their four children - ages 11 to 17 -were at their Abidjan home.

""There's always a remote miraculous possibility that he swam to shore. He was a good swimmer,'' said his father, retired Army chaplain J.W. Ferris.

Ferris was a missionary with the Nazarene Church, directing clinics that treat more than 40,000 people a year in Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria, his father said.

""He just felt God wanted him to do it,'' the elder Ferris said.

""He just always had that drive and made a lot of sacrifices. ''

Copyright 1996 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company

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