'Suicide bomber' on Somalia plane was meant to board Turkish flight

A suspected suicide bomber who blew a hole in the fuselage of a Daallo Airlines plane last week and forced it to make an emergency landing in Mogadishu was meant to be on a Turkish Airlines flight, Daallo’s chief executive said on Monday.

The bomber was sucked out of the plane through the one-yard-wide hole when the blast ripped open the pressurised cabin in flight, officials said. The pilot landed the plane in the Somali capital, from where it had taken off.

No group has so far taken responsibility for the attack but US officials suspect Islamist militant group al Shabaab, which has links to al-Qaida, was responsible for the blast.

Daallo Airlines chief executive, Mohamed Yassin, said most of the passengers who were on the bombed flight were scheduled to fly with Turkish Airlines, but were flown to Djibouti by one of his planes after the Turkish carrier cancelled its flight, citing bad weather.

“That particular passenger boarded the aircraft on a Turkish Airlines boarding pass and was on the list for the Turkish Airlines manifest,” Yassin told Reuters by telephone from Dubai.

Yassin said Daallo picked up the 70 stranded Turkish Airlines passengers to fly them to Djibouti, including the suicide bomber. In total, the flight had 74 passengers.