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The hole in the fuselage appeared close to the wing
Somalia has launched an investigation after a commercial plane made an emergency landing with a gaping hole in its fuselage in the capital, Mogadishu.
There were fears that the hole in the Daalo Airlines flight, bound for Djibouti, was caused by a bomb.
Reports said a person fell out of the hole, which appeared shortly after the plane took off from Mogadishu airport on Tuesday.
But Daalo Airlines says all 60 people on board have been accounted for.
Security officials say two passengers were hurt in the incident.
Some reports say a fire broke out shortly after take-off.
Serbian captain Vlatko Vodopivec said he and others were told the explosion was caused by a bomb, though civil aviation authority officials said they had found no evidence so far of a criminal act.
“It was my first bomb; I hope it will be the last,” Mr Vodopivec said. He said the blast happened when the plane was at around 11,000ft (3,350m).
“It would have been much worse if we were higher,” he added.
Darren Howe, who had a colleague on the plane, told the BBC that “it was not an explosion but a fuselage failure at 10,000ft”.
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.
Abdiwahid Omar, the director of Somalia’s civil aviation authority, told state-run Radio Mogadishu that authorities were not sure if the body was that of a passenger.
Daallo Airlines flies regularly from its base in Dubai to Somalia and Djibouti.
Somalia is battling militant Islamist group al-Shabab that has been carrying out deadly attacks in its quest to establish an Islamic state.
BBC