US News

Man sucked out of plane might have been suicide bomber

A passenger in a wheelchair may have been a suicide bomber who set off the blast that tore a hole in a jetliner — through which he was sucked out over Somalia, according to a Western diplomat.

Investigators believe the man used the wheelchair to circumvent security measures in Mogadishu before detonating the device, which failed to bring the plane down, the source told the Wall Street Journal.

His flaming body landed near the town of Balad, some 20 miles north of Mogadishu, where it was recovered by authorities.

“An individual got onto the plane in a wheelchair and is suspected of being the suicide bomber,” the diplomat, who is in direct contact with investigators, told the paper.

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The explosion jarred passengers and forced the pilot to make a ­dramatic descent as panic ensued.

Somali authorities have arrested the passenger who had been sitting in the next seat, the diplomat added.

The development comes amid increasing evidence that the explosion on the Daallo Airlines Airbus A321 was a terror attack by al-Shabaab, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia.

Based on images of the gaping hole, the US Defense Department determined that a bomb likely caused the blast, a senior defense official told the paper.

Daallo Airlines head Mohammed Ibrahim Yassin said Thursday that investigators have found apparent residue from explosives — though he cautioned that the findings were inconclusive.

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“We don’t know a lot, but certainly it looks like a device,” said an aviation safety expert, John Goglia.

“There’s a residue, they’re saying, of explosives. … There’s a trace,” Yassin told the AP at the carrier’s corporate office in Dubai. “But that cannot really make 100 percent that it’s a bomb.”

He said he expects initial findings to be released in a matter of days.

Yassin said he didn’t have information about a passenger boarding in a wheelchair but said all scenarios were being examined.

“Every single passenger is being studied and profiled,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

The Djibouti-bound plane made an emergency landing shortly after taking off from Mogadishu on Tuesday.

The pilot, Capt. Vlatko Vodopivec, has said that he and others were told the explosion was caused by a bomb.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, which also injured two passengers among the 74 on board.

At least one analyst said the lack of a claim makes it unlikely that al-Shabaab was behind the incident.

“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.