The group, which has close links to Al Qaeda, has been named as the main suspect of the blast on Tuesday on an Airbus A321 that saw one man get sucked out of the cabin.
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Mohamed Hassan, a police officer in Balad, an agricultural town 30km (18 miles) north of Mogadishu, said residents had found the body of a man who might have fallen from the plane.
“Al-Shabaab, if they did that business, al-Shabaab would claim it”, Zakaria Yusuf, an analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank, told the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, Associated Press reports that Somalia’s civil aviation authority has “found no evidence so far of a criminal act”. “All passengers, except one, disembarked safely after aircraft landed at the airport and now investigations are underway to ascertain the cause of one missing passenger”.
Cellphone video taken aboard the plane pans from 73 passengers, some wearing oxygen masks, in seats toward the back of the airliner in flight, and then swivels to the empty front area with a hole in the side of the cabin.
“It is likely this was a bomb attack”, a high-ranking diplomat with knowledge of the investigation said Thursday.
Anti-terrorism experts say if a bomb is confirmed as the cause of the plane explosion, it may also have been planted by members of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) new branches in Somalia.
Somali aviation official Ali Ibrahim said they estimate the plane was at an altitude of more than 12,000 feet when the blast occurred, about 15 minutes after the plane took off from the Mogadishu airport, bound for Djibouti.
According to onboard passengers, the charred body of an elderly person fell to the ground 15m away from Mogadishu airport. “Luckily, the flight controls were not damaged so I could return and land at the airport”, said the aircraft’s pilot, Vladimir Vodopivec.
Images showed the plane with a hole in the fuselage over one wing.
“It was my first bomb; I hope it will be the last, ” Mr Vodopivec said.
The 64-year-old said he had never had a similar experience during his long flying career. Experts praised the actions of the crew in landing Flight D3159 with terrified passengers.
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“The Shabab have upped their game”, said a former U.S. military official who works in Somalia.
