At least twenty-eight passengers on a Sudan Airways aircraft were killed when the Airbus veered off the runway and burst into flames shortly after landing at Khartoum airport in a sandstorm.

The aircraft was arriving from Amman, the Jordanian capital, carrying 203 passengers and 11 crew. The plane’s emergency chutes enabled the survivors to escape. Most of the passengers were believed to be Sudanese.

A security official said he had taken part in the rescue operation and seen at least four people trapped because they were strapped to stretchers inside the burning wreckage. Amman is a popular destination for wealthier Sudanese to go and seek medical treatment.

"At present, we have 28 bodies at Khartoum morgue," said Taher al-Haj Ibrahim, the general director of investigations.

"For now, we have counted 121 survivors," he said, adding that 22 of them were injured. "The rest we consider as missing, but according to our information, some passengers went home before they could be counted."

Sudanese authorities were to launch an official enquiry into the cause of the accident, television reported, amid contradictory reports that either weather or a technical failure were to blame.

The plane had flown from Amman via Damascus but been turned back once from Khartoum by bad weather and forced to land in Port Sudan, before being allowed to return to Khartoum, the official SUNA news agency said.

"There was an explosion in one of the engines and the plane caught fire," the airport director, Yussef Ibrahim, said in a television interview. "Whether it is a technical reason, we don’t know yet. The plane landed safely at Khartoum airport and they talked to the control tower which told them where to taxi. At this moment an explosion happened."

At the time of the landing a dust storm in the Sudanese capital was restricting visibility, residents said.

"So far we don’t have precise information but we think the weather is a main reason for what happened," said Mabrouk Mubarak Salim, Minister of State for Transport.

Television pictures showed flames tearing through the upper section of the fuselage hours after the fire broke out, and an emergency escape chute could be seen attached to one of the central doors of the aircraft.

Ibrahim Saleh, one of the passengers at the back of the plane, said he had not seen many bodies but that there had been "many injured" on the runway. He had first helped children off the plane before he himself had left. "When I got out there were still many people on board," he said.

Abbas al-Fadini, a member of the Sudanese parliament who was on the plane, told CNN television that the fire had started from the right engine and then spread to the inside of the plane.

He said he was in the front of the plane and was among the first to escape. Crew members were guiding people to the exit and some injured passengers were sent to local hospitals, he added.

A Sudanese civil aviation spokesman said the pilot had been slightly injured and all but one of the crew had been found alive. "The task of counting the survivors has been complicated because in the alarm and confusion they dispersed and some of them seem to have left the airport area," he added.

The disaster is the latest in a long line of fatal air crashes and mishaps in Sudan. In May, south Sudan’s defence minister was killed in a plane crash along with at least 22 other people, most of them senior members of the southern former rebel leadership.

In July 2003, 115 people were killed when a Sudan Airways Boeing 737 was destroyed in a ball of fire as it attempted to land at the Red Sea resort of Port Sudan after apparently suffering an engine problem soon after take-off.

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