By Emmanuel Braun

DOUALA, Cameroon, May 10 (Reuters) - Data from a French satellite station led Cameroon rescuers 150 km (94 miles) off track as they searched last weekend for a crashed Kenya Airways plane in which 114 people died, Cameroon's government said.

After nearly two days combing thick forest in southern Cameroon, rescuers found the plane late on Sunday in a swamp less than 6 km (4 miles) away from Douala airport where it had taken off, prompting widespread criticism over the delay.

Communication Minister Ebenezer Njoh Moulle said early search efforts had followed a lead based on information from the French Satellite Tracking Centre in Toulouse.

"The information they furnished pointed to two areas, one in South Africa and the other in Nyong and Soo (southern Cameroon). That is why the initial search for the plane was directed to Lolodorf and its surroundings, which is about 150 km from the actual crash site," he told reporters in Yaounde late on Wednesday.

The six-month-old Boeing 737-800 was carrying 105 passengers and nine crew from 27 nations, mostly African, with others from China, India, Europe and elsewhere.

Kenya's two main daily newspapers led their front pages on Thursday with questions about the crash, including why it took so long to find the accident site and wreckage.

"Is Cameroon able to handle the probe into this disaster? How could it take more than 24 hours to discover that a plane had crashed 30 seconds after take off and only 5 km away?" asked the East African Standard.

"We are bound to ask questions as to why the plane's distress signal frequency failed to operate automatically as it ought to be the case," Moulle said.

"Whatever the case, only the results of the on-going inquiry will tell us something about the technical problem that accounts for the delay in locating the wreckage of the plane and what went wrong with its distress signal frequency," he said.

Rescuers retrieved the in-flight data recorder, one of two "black boxes" on board, on Monday.

"There is still a distress beacon from the back of the plane which has not been found, and the voice recorder from the cockpit which could help determine the cause, which is 15 metres (yards) underground," Cameroon's Secretary of State for Transport Ndanga Ndinga Badel said in Douala.

Grieving relatives of the victims were urged to be patient as rescuers recover the last bodies from the stinking, waterlogged crash site ahead of a painstaking identification process. (Additional reporting by Tansa Musa in Yaounde and Wangui Kanina in Nairobi)

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