Foreign airlines flying to the Somali capital, Mogadishu on Wednesday halted their regular flights after a commuter jet plane made an emergency landing shortly after taking-off yesterday,
Flight D3159 of Daallo airlines departed from the Aden Abdulle International airport at 11:20am local time before turning back 20 minutes after takeoff. One passenger died after falling from the plane and three others sustained injuries, officials confirmed.
Turkish airlines, which makes four to five flights to the city every week, did not arrive on Wednesday as expected.
Officials at the airport and Turkish airlines representatives declined to comment on the reason.
‘’I was supposed to take flight from Mogadishu with Turkish airlines to Istanbul today and until now I haven’t been told the main reason why it didn’t come,’’ said Hirsi Abdi, a local businessman.
Investigations on the real cause of Daallo airlines plane emergency landing are still going on. Somalia’s Minister of Transportation, Ali Jangeli told reporters in the capital that the plane had to turn back due to a technical problem.
Some of the passengers told local media that something like a bomb explosion occurred inside the plane. But an official from the Daallo airlines in Mogadishu insisted that it was the oxygen tank that exploded.
