Somali intelligence officials released the surveillance footage on Sunday, which appeared to show a passenger being given a laptop concealing the bomb.
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Somalian authorities confirmed, for the first time, reports of a suspected suicide bomber who blasted himself aboard a Daallo Airlines plane causing a hole in the aircraft’s fuselage.
Officials probing the explosion initially suspected the bomber was able to bypass airport security by smuggling the device in his wheelchair before moving to another seat once on board, according to a source speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The plane’s pilot said that if the explosion happened when the aircraft was at a higher altitude it could have caused the jet to crash.
The Serb pilot who landed a jetliner in Somalia with a large hole on its fuselage says he has never doubted that it was caused by a bomb and describes the security at Mogadishu Airport as “zero”, according to the Associated Press. “Investigations are still ongoing”.
Somalia asked USA officials for help with investigations, and several FBI agents are on the ground assisting in Mogadishu, the spokesman said.
One passenger was reportedly sucked out of the plane and died and two others were injured in the incident shortly after take-off from the Somali capital.
Vlatoko Vodopivec, the pilot who returned the plane to Mogadishu airport to make an emergency landing, criticised the lack of security, saying: “The security is zero”.
“That particular passenger (who was behind the blast) 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. But it failed to bring down the Airbus A321-111 plane, which the pilot managed to turn around and land safely in Mogadishu. “While threats will always be there, this could happen at any other airport”, he said.
Somalia’s former director of national intelligence, Ahmed Moallim Fiqi, told VOA earlier that the nature of the attack and evidence pointed to “a planned bomb attack” against the airliner.
The hole in the Daallo Airlines plane cabin.
“We also believe the attack was planned and orchestrated by the terrorist group Al Shabab although we are not certain that Borleh was a direct member of the group”, a source said.
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