The plane of Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was forced to make an emergency landing in Mogadishu last Monday after reportedly catching fire during flight.
The president was unharmed in the incident, and there were no reports of any injuries, but local reports say that firefighters scrambled at the airport to put out the flames.
One of the first reports of the incident came from the Twitter feed run by the al-Shabab militant group but it did not say it had attacked the plane.
Government spokesman Abdirahman Omar Osman says the plane took off from Mogadishu’s airport at 9:00 a.m. local time but returned to the capital when, about 20 minutes into the flight, a technical problem developed in one of the plane’s two engines.
Airport officials said that the plane suffered a punctured tire on landing, but have so far denied any reports that the plane had caught fire.
The president was travelling to South Sudan for that country’s independence day celebrations. He and his delegation later boarded another flight and departed for South Sudan.
