A Sudanese airliner burst into flames after landing in Khartoum overnight in bad weather, killing at least 28 of the 217 people on board, officials said today.
Khartoum airport's head of medical services said authorities had so far established there were 123 survivors but that 66 people were unaccounted for. The plane's emergency chutes enabled the survivors to escape.
Twenty-eight bodies had been taken to a nearby mortuary, he said, adding that some of the 66 people unaccounted for might have survived and left the airport during the confusion after the plane fire broke out at about 8pm local time last night.
The nationalities of the dead were not immediately known.
The Sudan Airways plane, identified by Sudanese television only as an Airbus, was carrying 203 passengers and 14 crew on a flight from Jordan's capital Amman.
A dust storm and heavy rain had hit the airport on Tuesday, officials said.
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.
One passenger said the plane had tried to land at Khartoum airport "but then the captain told us we couldn't land because of bad weather".
He said the plane 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.