Suicide bomber may have blown hole in jet

MOGADISHU: A suicide bomber is suspected to have set off the explosive that blew a hole in a jetliner, sucked the man out of the plane and forced the aircraft to make an emergency landing in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, Somali officials said.

“Experts who were investigating the cause of the blast in the plane concluded that a bomb was the cause,” said Ali Jama Jangali, Somalia’s transport minister at a press conference in Mogadishu on Saturday.

“The bomb aimed to kill all on board the plane. Al-Shabaab (Somalia’s Islamic extremist rebel group) was behind it,” he said of the explosion on a Daallo Airlines Airbus 321 on Saturday.

He said the findings are preliminary and the investigation is continuing.

One passenger, Abdullahi Abdisalam Borle, died, according to Somali officials who did not give any details.

A man’s body was found in the town of Balad, 30km north of Mogadishu, according to police who said he might have been blown from the plane.

A senior Somali civil aviation official who insisted on anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the press said the man killed in the incident is suspected to have been a suicide bomber.

“The reason the investigation is focusing on him now is because of the suspicion that he might have detonated the bomb, but it’s too early to say if the bomb was planted in a laptop or not,” he said.

Six people have been arrested in connection with the blast after examinations of CCTV images in the airport, a senior Somali intelligence official said.

Al-Shabaab have not claimed responsibility for the incident.

All other 74 passengers on the plane were safe after the pilot returned the plane safely to Mogadishu airport. The explosion happened about 15 minutes after the plane took off and it was still ascending.

Captain Vlatko Vodopivec, the pilot, said he and others were told the explosion was caused by a bomb.

Vodopivec said the blast happened when the plane was at around 3,350m.

“It would have been much worse if we were higher,” he added.

Had the blast occurred at a higher altitude, it could have led to explosive decompression on the plane, which might have caused more severe structural damage, and would have forced a more rapid descent because of limited supplies of oxygen to the passengers.

After the explosion, passengers put on oxygen masks and air could be heard rushing thought the hole in the fuselage, according to a video taken by a passenger.

Somalia’s government said it will tighten security at the airport to prevent other threats.