28 dead, dozens missing in Sudan plane inferno
KHARTOUM (AFP) — At least 28 people died when a passenger jet caught fire after landing at Khartoum airport, officials said on Wednesday, with dozens more still missing as authorities probed the cause of the accident.
The bodies of the 28 people who burned to death when the Sudan Airways Airbus A310 caught fire late on Tuesday have been taken to Khartoum's morgue, a Sudanese official said, adding that 121 people survived the accident.
State television previously reported that nearly half of the 203 passengers were killed when the plane from Amman burst into flames after one of its engines exploded on landing. The plane was carrying 11 crew.
"At present, we have 28 bodies at Khartoum morgue," said Taher al-Haj Ibrahim, the general director of investigations. "For now, we have counted 121 survivors," he said, adding that 22 of them were injured.
"The rest we consider as missing, but according to our information, some passengers went home before they could be counted."
Sudanese authorities were to launch an official enquiry into the cause of the accident, television reported, amid contradictory reports that either weather or a technical failure were to blame.
Airport authorities said an engine caught fire, spreading to the fuselage, whilse survivors said weather conditions at the time of the landing were poor, with the capital hit by a sandstorm and then heavy showers.
The plane had flown from Amman via Damascus but been turned back once from Khartoum by bad weather and forced to land in Port Sudan, before being allowed to return to Khartoum, the official SUNA news agency said.
"There was an explosion in one of the engines and the plane caught fire," airport director Yussef Ibrahim said in a television interview.
TV pictures showed flames tearing through the upper section of the fuselage hours after the fire broke out. An emergency escape slide could be seen attached to one of the central doors of the plane.
"The plane landed at 8:45," civil aviation official El-Sheikh el-Faki told AFP. "It landed okay and then it skidded and caught fire."
State Transport Minister Mabruk Mubarak Salim said "today's weather is one of the main reasons for what happened."
A security official, who asked not to be named, said he had taken part in the rescue operation and seen at least four people trapped because they were strapped to stretchers inside the burning wreckage.
Amman is a popular destination for wealthier Sudanese to go and seek medical treatment.
"I've been travelling a lot, I know when a landing is rough," survivor Awad Mohamed Idris, a retired Sudan Airways employee, told AFP. "This landing was very rough."
"When it came to a stop, fire was burning the right side of the plane and was beginning to burn the inside of the plane."
After landing, the cabin filled with smoke and he jumped onto an escape chute, Idris said. "After I left the plane I was still coughing."
Idris managed to find his relatives in the arrivals hall, but another man who gave his name as Aman said he was looking for the one-year-old child of a couple who had been hospitalised.
Police official Mohammed Naguib al-Tayyeb had earlier told the broadcaster that most passengers had managed to escape the aircraft without injury but some had suffered burns.
Ibrahim Saleh, one of the passengers at the back of the plane, told AFP he had not seen many bodies but that there had been "many injured" on the tarmac.
He had first helped children off the plane before he himself had left.
"When I got out there were still many people on board," he said.
The disaster is the latest in a long line of fatal air crashes and mishaps in Sudan.
In May, south Sudan's defence minister was killed in a plane crash along with at least 22 other people, most of them senior members of the southern former rebel leadership.
In July 2003, 115 people were killed when a Sudan Airways Boeing 737 was destroyed in a ball of fire as it attempted to land at the Red Sea resort of Port Sudan after apparently suffering an engine problem soon after take-off.
After that crash, the Khartoum government said the Sudanese air fleet was growing old and that the national airliner had not been able to buy spare parts for its US-made aircraft due to economic sanctions imposed by Washington, which has placed Sudan on its list of countries supporting terrorism.
Washington maintains that the sanctions do not prevent the delivery of spare parts for planes if these are requested.
