Benin declared three days of national mourning Saturday as crews recovered more bodies from a Christmas Day plane crash that killed at least 138 people, many of them Lebanese.

Lebanon's foreign minister, arriving home from a brief trip to Benin, said overloading may have caused the plane to go down moments after takeoff.

"It appears that the number of passengers exceeds the normal number, in addition to the load, which it appears was very much in excess," Jean Obeidhe told reporters after arriving in Beirut with 15 survivors, including 12 Lebanese, two Palestinians and a Syrian.

The Boeing 727 had 161 people aboard when it clipped a building near the airport's perimeter just after takeoff Thursday in Cotonou, the commercial capital, and plummeted into the shallow surf off Benin's Atlantic Ocean coast.

Benin Foreign Minister Rogatien Biaou said over state radio that 21 people survived, including a pilot.

By Friday night, the search for survivors had been called off and 130 bodies, mostly Lebanese, had been recovered, Biaou said. A military cargo plane sent by France was waiting to airlift corpses to Beirut.

Benin's government ordered the start of three days of national morning, and flags were lowered at government buildings in the impoverished West African country of 9 million.

Lebanon also ordered flags flown at half staff Saturday and Sunday.

In Cotonou's main city morgue, relatives of the victims, mainly Lebanese, huddled in groups trying to identify the dead, holding handkerchiefs over their noses to guard against the corpses' stench.

Eight more bodies washed ashore Saturday and were taken away by medical teams in ambulances to the city's overcrowded morgues.

The Bangladeshi military announced that 15 Bangladeshi peacekeepers were among the dead. The peacekeepers were serving in missions in the war-ravaged West African nations of Sierra Leone and Liberia and were returning home for a break.

French investigators, meanwhile, were to arrive in Benin on Saturday to help search for the plane's flight data recorder, Transport Minister Ahmed Akobi said. The cockpit voice recorder was recovered Friday.

Large pieces of the jet - including a wing, two engines and the cockpit - were still on the beach Saturday. People stood around watching as young boys sifted through the debris for valuables or lounged on tattered aircraft seats from the downed plane.