SOMALIA: Wheelchair Man Was Likely Suicide Bomber On Daallo Flight

A suicide bomber strapped into a wheelchair may have been behind the mid-flight explosion on board the Daallo Airlines plane, officials said.

The alleged bomber then detonated the bomb soon after takeoff, which blew a hole in the Airbus A321’s fuselage but couldn’t not down it.

The bomber, engulfed in flames, was believed to have been sucked out of plane. Witnesses on the ground said they saw a body fall to the ground after the blast Wednesday. The body was recovered near the town of Balad, about 20 miles from Mogadishu.

The suspected terrorist, believed to be part of the Somalia-based Islamic group known as Al-Shabaab, may have faked a disability to con his way through security checks at Mogadishu airport.

U.S. government sources said on Wednesday that initial forensic testing had detected possible traces of the explosive TNT on the aircraft. But one official cautioned that such tests have a high false-positive rate, and further tests are underway.

Daallo Airlines, which did not refer to a blast, said on its website that the “incident” that caused a hole in the fuselage happened 15 minutes into the flight.

Survivor Hassan Mohamed Nur said “I saw the passenger, a man in his early 60s, get sucked out of the plane. There was a huge bang. A big hole appeared in the side of the jet and the man disappeared through it.

“One minute he was sat in his seat, the next he was gone. He’d been sucked out of the plane.

“People were screaming. We all thought we were going to die.”