Survivors braved flames to escape Sudanese jet

KHARTOUM, SUDAN - Passenger Abdel-Menem Hassanein remembers the jetliner landing, and then chaos -- an explosion, flames at the front of the plane, screams and the sounds of passengers uttering their last prayers.

The 75-year-old soon realized that the flight attendant at the back of the plane where he and his wife sat could not open the exit door.

"Many things were happening at once ... people rushed toward the only open door at the front," he said.

He hurried there, pushed his 65-year-old wife out the exit and onto the emergency slide -- past the flames -- and then followed her.

The couple and more than 170 other people escaped the inferno on the Sudan Airways flight Tuesday night that killed at least 30 people.

"If I didn't keep my cool, we both would have been finished," Hassanein said Wednesday by telephone from his home outside Khartoum.

The jet skidded off the runway at Khartoum International Airport during a thunderstorm and rammed into the lights used by pilots to navigate when landing, sparking a fire on the aircraft's right side, said police spokesman Maj. Gen. Mohammed Abdel Majid Al-Tayeb.

The blaze raged for hours, eventually splitting the plane in two, before firefighters put it out. Thirty people were killed, including one flight attendant; 178 escaped, and six people remain unaccounted for, some of whom may have walked away from the crash site, Sudan Airways said.

A state burial ceremony was held Wednesday for several of the victims at a downtown Khartoum cemetery.

Airbus said it was sending in specialists to help with the inquiry into the crash of the A310, a twin-engine Airbus plane used by carriers around the world. The plane involved in the accident was 18 years old and had been operated by Sudan Airways since September.

The flight originated in Amman, Jordan and stopped in Damascus, Syria, and Port Sudan before landing in Khartoum.

ASSOCIATED PRESS