A large passenger plane belonging to the Somaliland-owned Daallo Airlines made an emergency landing right after take off at Mogadishu airport.
Two of the passengers, it was reported, sustained minor injuries.
Neither the airline nor the authorities at the airport of the structurally faulty ‘Federal’ governmnet of Somalia offered any plausible explanations to the incident only citing ‘fire’ that broke out on the plane, also, failing to mention where exactly the fire broke out, who started it, and whether foul play was susupected or not.
Pictures taken of the plane, however, show an alarming, gaping hole on the side of the airliner.
The incident follows only one day after the Mogadishu, AMISOM-guarded administration heavy-handedly cancelled flights to and fro Mogadishu shuttling between it and Hargeisa further straining an uneasy bi-lateral relations between the two countries in the spirit of talks between the two sides that the international community chaperoned since 2012.
The Mogadishu move makes it crystal clear to all political observers and international organizations such as the UN, the AU, the EU, IGAD…that Somaliland was, indeed, the Republic of Somaliland, inadvertently acknowledging the country’s rightful place among sovereign nations: a sovereignty the ex-British Somaliland so naively sacrificed for a five-Somali Union in 1960 – thus the five-pronged star in Somalia flag.
It was only last week that Mogadishu concluded a ‘consultative’ conference at the end of which the administration has once more put the Republic of Somaliland on the same pedestal with satellite ‘states’ which replaced Somalia gubernatorial administrations in a number of its regions.
The airliner was heading to Djibouti at the time of the accident.
