On the airport of Khartoem, capitol of Sudan, an Airbus plane has crashed during landing and slid off the landing strip.
At the time, there was a sandstorm, and one of the engines exploded during landing.
203 people on board, about half of them were able to glide to safety.
The plane had taken off from SYRIA and made a stop in Jordan.

Sudan plane bursts into flames, 120 killed

By Andrew Heavens 41 minutes ago

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - A Sudan Airways plane burst into flames after landing at Khartoum airport on Tuesday and 120 of the 217 passengers were killed, the head of the airport's medical services said.
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"There are 120 bodies and 97 survivors," Major-General Mohamed Osman Mahjoub told Reuters. But other officials suggested the number of dead might be smaller.

Sudanese television showed film of the aircraft ablaze in the darkness while emergency workers played water hoses on the burning fuselage. The airliner, identified by the broadcaster as an Airbus, was carrying 203 passengers and 14 crew.

"The operation to recover bodies from the plane is going on now," police deputy director general Al Adel Ajeb told Sudan Television. "It is a difficult operation because some bodies are completely burnt and there are body parts..."

One passenger said the plane, which had flown from Amman, had tried to land at Khartoum airport "but then the captain told us we couldn't land because of bad weather."

He said they then flew to the Red Sea city of Port Sudan before returning to Khartoum an hour later.

"When (the pilot) tried to land there was a crash," the passenger told Sudan Television.

At the time of the landing a dust storm in the Sudanese capital was restricting visibility, residents said.

Another survivor, Al Haj Bashir, said the landing in Khartoum was "not normal" and described "an explosion in the right wing" two or three minutes after the plane landed.

Mabrouk Mubarak Salim, Minister of State for Transport, said there was an explosion in the right side of the engine. "So far we don't have precise information but we think the weather is a main reason for what happened."

EMERGENCY CHUTES

Earlier, the spokesman for the Sudanese Ministry of Civil Aviation, Zuheir Hamadallah, told Reuters rescue teams had located nine bodies. Four of them were in the police hospital near the airport and five had been recovered from the plane.

"But the total number is probably more because the rescuers have only just started looking around inside the plane," he said.

A mortuary near Khartoum airport has received 28 bodies. Youssef Mukhtar, a doctor who visited the mortuary in the early hours of Wednesday said: "they expect more."

Another hospital official said the death toll of 120 may have arisen by counting the known survivors and assuming that all the others died in the fire. But some survivors dispersed in the chaos and left the airport area, officials said.

At its height, the fire, which was later put out, appeared to be consuming the fuselage and cockpit area. Television pictures showed emergency escape chutes deployed at the side of the blazing aircraft. Ambulances drove on to the tarmac.

The civil aviation spokesman said the pilot was slightly injured and all but one of the crew had been found alive.

"The task of counting the survivors has been complicated because in the alarm and confusion they dispersed and some of them seem to have left the airport area," he added.

Airport director Yusuf Ibrahim told Sudanese television the cause of the fire was not yet clear.

"Whether it is a technical reason, we don't know yet," he said. "The plane was coming from Amman and Syria... it landed safely at Khartoum airport and they talked to the control tower which told them where to taxi. At this moment an explosion happened."

Five years ago a Sudan Airways Boeing 737 crashed shortly after takeoff near Port Sudan, killing 104 passengers and the crew of 11.

Sudan Airways plane inferno kills 100 in Khartoum

by Talal Osman 1 hour, 15 minutes ago

KHARTOUM (AFP) - Around 100 people burned to death when a Sudan Airways Airbus caught fire after landing at Khartoum airport Tuesday, officials and state television said.
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Airport authorities said an engine caught fire, spreading to the fuselage, whilst TV reports stated that the weather conditions at the time of the landing were poor, with the capital hit by first a sandstorm and then heavy showers.

"Preliminary reports indicate that about half the 203 passengers on board are dead," a television presenter said.

At least 103 passengers and 10 of 11 crew survived, although an unknown number of passengers left the crash scene without registering with the authorities, said a civil aviation authority statement read out on television.

The plane had just touched down from Amman via Damascus when the fire broke out, the television said.

Airport director Yussef Ibrahim said the blaze was caused when an engine exploded.

"There was an explosion in one of the engines and the plane caught fire," he said in a television interview.

"The plane landed at 8:45," civil aviation official El-Sheikh el-Faki told AFP. "It landed OK and then it skidded and caught fire."

Television pictures showed flames tearing through the upper section of the fuselage hours after the fire broke out and an emergency escape slide could be seen attached to one of the central doors of the plane.

State Transport Minister Mabruk Mubarak Salim said that "today's weather is one of the main reasons for what happened."

The plane had been forced to land in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, before being authorised to continue on to Khartoum because the weather was so bad, Salim said.

"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."

He said that the safety briefing before take off from Port Sudan had been cut short and that "the pilot seemed in a hurry."

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.

Riot police reinforcements were sent to the airport where anxious relatives' emotions boiled over.

"These guys have no procedures," shouted a man who gave his name as Mohammed, whose sister-in-law and her three children were on the flight. "They're not well equipped, they should have called on us to help."

Mohammed said that he knew that two of the children had survived but had no news of his sister-in-law and the youngest child.

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.

Emergency services rushed to the burning aircraft and had by late Tuesday brought the fire under control, an AFP correspondent on the scene said.

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.

Abbas al-Fadini, a member of the Sudanese parliament who was on the plane, told CNN television that he was in the front of the plane and was among those who exited first.

Sudanese Ambassador to the United States John Ukec told CNN that the weather had been "terrible" when the plane landed in Khartoum.

"The plane veered off the runway. There was a lot of rain and a lot of mud and this caused the crash. It is a tragedy. The plane simply veered off the runway. There's no terrorism involved.

The disaster is the latest in a long line of fatal air crashes and mishaps in Sudan.

In May this year, 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 coast 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.

CNN just reported that a Minister was on board of the plane.