BAMAKO, Mali — Rescue workers sought to recover corpses and extinguish fires on Monday from a crowded neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, where an airliner plummeted from the sky and barreled into the side of a building the day before.

The pilot had reported engine trouble just before the plane went down, killing all 153 people on board and an unknown number of people on the ground, according to Harold Demuren, director general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority.

“Two engines were having problems,” Mr. Demuren said in a telephone interview on Monday morning, shouting over sirens as he stood near the crash site. “That’s what he told the control tower.”