Johannesburg - A team of South African experts in the identification of bodies and in search and rescue operations is scheduled to fly to Lagos on Wednesday, to complete the task of identifying the 67 South Africans killed when a church building collapsed in that city on Friday.
Officials said that the government would later fly relatives of those who died, to Lagos to help identify them.
And they said that the government's Joint Operations team - comprising security and disaster relief agencies - would meet on Wednesday to decide whether South Africa should send a full search and rescue team to help the Nigerian authorities.
On Tuesday a woman was brought out of the rubble of the building still alive and barely scathed so the chances of finding more survivors cannot be ruled out.
The Nigerian government has reassured Pretoria that it has the situation under control but South African diplomats on the ground in Lagos have told their head office that they are not so sure.
South African officials complained earlier on Tuesday that one of the reasons it was taking so long to determine if any South Africans had been killed or injured in the accident was that Nigerian authorities were not cooperating.
But it emerged last night that the mail culprit was the Synagogue Church of All Nations itself, and its leader, the self-styled prophet and faith healer TB Joshua.
The South African officials said that all the South Africans – like the hundreds of other foreign visitors to the church – had had to surrender their passports when they arrived there.
This made identification of bodies and nationalities more difficult than it should have been.
And the officials said that the church had at first refused to allow Nigerian rescue personnel onto the site after the building collapsed on Friday.
Joshua has been insinuating that the Nigerian Islamist terror group Boko Haram was behind the collapse but Nigerian disaster relief officials said the more likely cause was that construction workers were adding two extra storeys to the four storey building without reinforcing the foundations.
Foreign Bureau