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With a loud bang it landed in total darkness

By Shehab Ahmed
The BG 609 flight of Bangladesh Biman which crash-landed in Sylhet on Monday night took oil 50 minutes behind schedule with 88 people Including four crew on
Unsuspecting passengers had no Idea that Biman was delivering them not at the Os-many Airport in Sylhet but on the mud plains of Metka beel. a wetland beside the Chengi river, eight km from the runway.
As the overused tape played folk and patriotic tunes. Tota Miah. a British citizen, took a deep breath and looked through the windows for a glimpse of his home he had left years ago.
Miah and 36 others had been coming home on Christmas holiday from Britain. Others were coming home from the Gulf.
"We felt that the aircraft jumped to a high pitch. With a loud bang it landed in total darkness soon after the captain had announced that we were reaching Sylhet Osmany Airport in five minutes." Suiaud-dowlah. a survivor, told our Staff Correspondent in Sylhet. Iqbal Slddique.
He told him that there was a mad rush for the exit doors when "we found that we were not at the airport but at a dark place after the heavy Jerk."
k "It was the mercy of Allah that He saved the lives of passengers." thinks Dowlah. on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Hazrat Shahjalal (RA).
Groaning and writhing in pain, another survivor said, "it was cold and dark. Dense fog had clouded the vision. But the soft bed of the beel in the winter probably saved us."
Babul Hossain further said "after overcoming the shock, we knew that something had gone wrong. Many started screaming and calling for Allah's help. Soon we realised we had landed on the mud."
Pilot Mannan, in his hospital bed, told a reporter he used the emergency exit in the cockpit after the aircraft had "roughly hit the ground and I saw myself bleeding from the nose. It is Allah who saved us." He thanked the Almighty for keeping him and the passengers alive.
"The aircraft appeared to have been strongly pushed by the stormy wind soon after I had made the announcement for landing. And it went beyond control." he said.
But later, he was forbidden to talk to anyone other than officials. He was shifted to a separate cabin. The co-pilot and two air hostesses were also kept in separate rooms.
Biman sources in Dhaka suspect that the pilot had missed the runway apparently in thick fog that blanketed the area Monday night. The cause of delay in the aircraft's departure from Dhaka was not known immediately.
When the aircraft was approaching the runway, probably the pilot had realised that he had overshot it. His last message was turning in bound.
In technical terms it meant that he was going to make another go' for the landing.
There was no follow-up messages from the flight at around 10:36 pm when it disappeared from the radar and lost contact with the control tower at Os-many airport, highly placed sources told The Daily Star last night.
A Civil Aviation source said the flat landing raised a number of questions. It appeared that the aircraft had entered an airoocket. received sudden jolts before it touched down. If it was descending on the second turn after the last radio message, the aircraft would have stuck nose down on the mud.
The aircraft, was damaged totally, a Civil Aviation official at Sylhet said. Small scraps of the damaged part of the aircraft were strewn around 200 square yards of the crash site.
The four wheels of the plane were found by rescuers scattered about 50 to 100 yards away, when Iqbal Siddique visited the crash site.
BDR and police haj been deployed to guard the wreckage.