A Somali passenger plane returned to Mogadishu airport on Tuesday after catching fire, airline officials and passengers said.
Two of the 74 people on board were injured, one of them seriously, Daallo Airlines representative Abdinasir Nur said.
The aircraft en route from Mogadishu to Djibouti “was in the air for about 20 minutes … when we heard a loud explosion inside the plane, followed by flames that lit up one side of it,” passenger Halimo Omar said.
The plane returned to the airport and made an emergency landing.
Photographs of the plane shared on twitter showed a hole in its right side near the engine.
#BREAKING: Daallo Airlines Airbus A321 reported explosion & fire after take-off from #Mogadishu: 2 injured pic.twitter.com/el03lJyQiA
— Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) February 2, 2016
An investigation was launched into the incident, which Nur tentatively attributed to a “technical problem.”
