Araweelo News Network
Authorities are trying to figure out the reason for an explosion and fire that blew a gaping hole into the side of a Somali jetliner Tuesday, forcing an emergency landing at the airport on Mogadishu.
Mogadishu(ANN)The plane made an emergency landing at Aden Adde Airport in Somalia’s capital, with a hole that appeared shortly after the plane took off, according to the BBC.
The Daalo Airlines flight had 74 people on board as it headed to Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.
Two passengers were hurt in the incident, according to various news reports, and Nano News reported that a loud bang was heard followed by flames.
Locals have said they saw a severely burned body fall from a passenger jet, Nano News reported.
Passenger Darren Howe told the BBC, “It was not an explosion but a fuselage failure at 10,000 feet.”
The airline, based in Dubai, did not respond to an email sent to its corporate office.
The pilot said he thinks it was a bomb. An aviation expert who looked at photographs of the hole in the fuselage said the damage was consistent with an explosive device.
“Luckily, the flight controls were not damaged so I could return and land at the airport,” said pilot Vladimir Vodopivec, who was quoted by Belgrade daily Blic. “Something like this has never happened in my flight career. We lost pressure in the cabin. Thank god it ended well,” the 64-year-old pilot said.
Awale Kullane, Somalia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, who was on board the flight, said on Facebook that he “heard a loud noise and couldn’t see anything but smoke for a few seconds.” When visibility returned they realized “quite a chunk” of the plane was missing, he wrote.
Kullane, who was going to Djibouti to attend a conference for diplomats, also posted a video showing some passengers putting on oxygen masks inside the plane. The post was later removed from his Facebook page.
“We don’t know a lot, but certainly it looks like a device,” said John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. There are only two things that could have caused a hole in the plane that looks like the one in photos circulated online — a bomb or a pressurization blowout caused by a flaw or fatigue in the plane’s skin, said Goglia.
The photos appear to show black soot around the aircraft skin that is peeled back, Goglia said. A pressurization blowout wouldn’t create soot, but a bomb would, he said.
Another passenger, Mohamed Ali, said that he and others heard a bang before flames opened a gaping hole in the plane’s side.
“I don’t know if it was a bomb or an electric shock, but we heard a bang inside the plane,” he said, adding he could not confirm reports that passengers had fallen from the plane.
Mohamed Hassan, a police officer in nearby Balad town, said residents had found the dead body of an old man who might have fallen from a plane. Balad is an agricultural town about 18 miles north of Mogadishu.
Somalia faces an insurgency perpetrated by the Somali Islamic extremist group al-Shabab, which is responsible for many deadly attacks across the nation.
The Associated Press
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