By SPA,
Khartoum : A Sudanese airliner coming from Amman and Damascus burst into flames after landing in Khartoum on Tuesday night, killing at least 33 of the 217 people on board, officials and witnesses said on Wednesday.
Reuters quoted Doctors and officials as saying that the local mortuary had received 28 bodies by 3 a.m. on Wednesday (midnight GMT) and witnesses said they saw rescue teams remove five more bodies from the charred wreckage of the plane after daybreak.
The Civil Aviation Authority said it had counted 113 survivors but that other people had left the site of the incident and gone straight home without informing the authorities.
Presidential adviser Ghazi Salahaddin said that 50 to 60 people were unaccounted for.
The Sudan Airways plane, identified by Sudanese television only as an Airbus without any model details, was carrying 203 passengers and 14 crew on the flight from the Jordanian capital.
A dust storm and heavy rain hit the airport on Tuesday and the plane was initially diverted to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
Sudan’s Minister of State for Transport, Mabrouk Mubarak Salim, said there was an explosion in the airliner’s right wing engine area. “So far we don’t have precise information but we think the weather is a main reason for what happened,” he said.
Sudanese television showed emergency workers using hoses to spray water on the burning fuselage of the airliner.
“The operation to recover bodies from the plane is going on now,” police deputy director general Al Adel Ajeb said in a television interview. “It is a difficult operation because some bodies are completely burned and there are body parts.”