Somalia Plane Terror Attack Linked to Suicide Bomber
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.
The jetliner was forced to do an emergency landing in the country's capital Mogadishu after the bombing incident resulted to a death of a passenger, presumably the bomber himself, who sucked out of the plane following the explosion.
"We have confirmed that it was a bomb that exploded in the Daallo Airlines flight. It was meant to kill all aboard," said Somalian minister Ali Ahmed Jamac as quoted by the Reuters.
The transport minister also pins the blame on Somalia's jihadist group known as Al-Shabab citing updates from experts who are currently conducting an investigation into the matter.
The attention is now focused on the only dead passenger named Abdullahi Abdisalam Borle, whose corpse was located in Balad town some 18 miles north of Mogadishu. Reports have been circulating that the explosive device may have been planted in his laptop which caused him to be blown off the plane after the blast. So, far officials remain silent on some details of the incident.
"The reason the investigation is focusing on him now is because of the suspicion that he might have detonated the bomb, but it's too early to say if the bomb was planted in a laptop or not," remarked another senior Somalian aviation officer who requested anonymity as mentioned in a report by ABC News.
To help the existing probe on a possible suicide attack linked to ISIS, Somalia invited the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
"This was a sophisticated attack ... so we reached out to our international partners," said Prime Minister Spokesman Abdisalam Aato as reported by CNN.
