Pilot recounts blast on jet, emergency return to Mogadishu

MOGADISHU, Somalia – An explosion that blew a hole in a jetliner shortly after takeoff and left one man missing is believed to have been caused by a bomb, the pilot said Wednesday, describing how the crew calmed passengers as smoke filled the cabin before he brought the plane back to Mogadishu’s airport for an emergency landing.

Residents of Balad, a town 18 miles north of Mogadishu, found the body of a man who might have been blown out of the Airbus 321 in Tuesday’s blast, police officer Mohamed Hassan said.

Abdiwahid Omar, the director of Somalia’s civil aviation authority, told state-run Radio Mogadishu that authorities were not sure if the body was the missing passenger.

Government officials also said no evidence had been found so far of a criminal act.

Mohammed Ibrahim Yassin, CEO of Daallo Airlines, did not rule out that a bomb planted on the aircraft was responsible.

“At this stage, everything is possible. We cannot rule out anything at this stage,” Yassin said.

Somalia faces an insurgency from the extremist group al-Shabab, which has carried out many deadly attacks across the nation.

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

“It was my first bomb; I hope it will be the last,” Vodopivec told the AP by phone from Mogadishu. He said the blast happened when the plane was at around 11,000 feet and still climbing to its cruising altitude of 30,000 feet.

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

Daallo Airlines said all passengers except one got off the plane safely. The plane, which was headed to Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, carried 74 passengers.

Yassin acknowledged signs pointed to the possibility a passenger was sucked from the plane at the time of the blast.