At least 28 killed in Sudan plane blaze

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - A Sudanese airliner burst into flamesafter landing in Khartoum overnight in bad weather, killing atleast 28 of the 217 people on board, officials said onWednesday.

Khartoum airport's head of medical services, Major-GeneralMohamed Osman Mahjoub, said authorities had so far establishedthere were 123 survivors but 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,said Mahjoub, adding that some of the 66 people unaccounted formight have survived and left the airport during the confusionafter the plane fire broke out on Tuesday night.

The nationalities of the dead were not immediately known.

The Sudan Airways plane, identified by Sudanese televisiononly as an Airbus without any model details, was carrying 203passengers 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 MubarakSalim, said there was an explosion in the airliner's right wingengine area. "So far we don't have precise information but wethink the weather is a main reason for what happened," he said.

Sudanese television showed emergency workers using hoses tospray water on the burning fuselage of the airliner.

"The operation to recover bodies from the plane is going onnow," police deputy director general Al Adel Ajeb said in atelevision interview. "It is a difficult operation because somebodies are completely burned and there are body parts."

"BAD WEATHER"

One passenger said the plane had tried to land at Khartoumairport "but then the captain told us we couldn't land becauseof bad weather".

He said the plane then flew to the Red Sea city of PortSudan before returning to Khartoum an hour later.

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

Another survivor, Al Haj Bashir, said the landing inKhartoum was "not normal" and that there was "an explosion inthe right wing" two or three minutes after the plane landed.

A mortuary near Khartoum airport said it had received 28bodies. Youssef Mukhtar, a doctor who visited the mortuaryearly on Wednesday said: "They expect more."

At its height the fire appeared to be consuming thefuselage and cockpit area. The emergency crews eventuallymanaged to extinguish the blaze.

Television pictures showed emergency escape chutes at theside of the blazing aircraft and ambulances on the tarmac.

A spokesman for Sudan's civil aviation authorities said allbut one of the crew had been found alive.

"The task of counting the survivors has been complicatedbecause in the alarm and confusion they dispersed and some ofthem seem to have left the airport area," said the spokesman.

"Whether (the fire was due to) a technical reason we don'tknow yet," airport director Yusuf Ibrahim told Sudanese TV.

"The plane was coming from Amman and Syria ... It landedsafely at Khartoum airport and they talked to the control towerwhich told them where to taxi. At this moment an explosionhappened," he said.

Five years ago, a Sudan Airways Boeing 737 crashed shortlyafter takeoff near Port Sudan, killing 104 passengers and thecrew of 11.

(Additional reporting by Diana Abdallah in London andJonathan Wright in Cairo, editing by Ralph Gowling)