Yassin, the Daallo Airlines chief executive, said almost all of the passengers who were aboard the bombed Somali flight were originally scheduled to fly with Turkish Airlines, which canceled its flight due to bad weather.
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The aircraft survived the blast, which happened about 15 minutes after take off, but was forced to abort its journey to Djibouti and make an emergency landing at Mogadishu airport.
Two out of around 60 passengers on board were injured, police said on Wednesday.
“At least 20 people, including the two men in the CCTV footage who handed over the laptop to the suspected bomber, were arrested in connection with the explosion in the aircraft”, Atto said.
The pilot, a 64-year-old Serb named Vladimir Vodopivec, told a friend that he knew for sure that the blast had been caused by a bomb, the Serbian daily Blic reported.
The jet exploded soon after taking off from Mogadishu airport on February 2.
Mogadishu airport staff and Daallo employees were among those detained, and more arrests might be forthcoming, according to the official, who declined to be identified.
Somali investigators said they believe a bomb that ripped a hole into a plane and killed a passenger was planted inside a laptop. “But a deliberate terror act”.
The investigation was carried out jointly by the Somali intelligence agency and global experts specialiSing in bomb-related issues, Jama said.
“They were not our passengers”.
Though it contained a military grade of the explosive TNT, the source said, it failed to bring down Daallo Airlines Flight 3159.
Somalia’s government said it will tighten security at the airport to prevent other threats.
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Somalia-based terror group Al Shabaab, which has close links to Al Qaeda, are thought to be behind the attack on the Airbus A321. It also encompasses offices and residential areas that are physically walled off from the surrounding city, a veritable “green zone” whose tenants include Bancroft, a US-owned security contractor. He was sucked out of the airliner Tuesday through the hole from the blast. Notably, Al Shabab has until now not claimed responsibility for the incident nor has any other known terror group associated with a presence in Somalia.
