By Andrew Heavens
KHARTOUM (Reuters) - A Sudanese airliner coming from Ammanand Damascus burst into flames after landing in Khartoum onTuesday night, killing at least 29 of the roughly 214 people onboard, officials and witnesses said on Wednesday.
At least 171 passengers were able to escape the burningSudan Airways plane and survived, while 14 others were stillmissing, Civil Aviation Authority Spokesman Abdel Hafiz AbdelRahim said.
He said the aviation authority was hoping that those listedas missing had left the airport in the confusion after theblaze and gone straight home without informing authorities.
The nationalities of the dead were not immediately knownbut diplomats who have examined the manifest said that almostall the names appeared to be Arabic. Airport officials saidthey thought the vast majority were Sudanese.
"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.
Sudan's aviation authority said a 12-strong team wasinvestigating the cause of the fire and would search for the"black box" flight data recorder of the Airbus A310.
Airbus said it was sending a team of five experts from itsToulouse headquarters to Sudan and pledged to help the Sudaneseauthorities in the investigation.
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.
A dust storm and heavy rain hit the airport on Tuesday andthe plane was initially diverted to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
COMBING THROUGH WRECKAGE
Sudanese television showed emergency workers using hoses tospray water on the burning fuselage. Teams of workers continuedto comb through the blackened wreckage on Wednesday morning.
"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."
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.
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.
The civil aviation authorities said all but one of the crewhad been found alive.
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 Jon Boyle)
