MOGADISHU: One passenger is missing after a blast on a commercial airliner that ripped a hole in its fuselage shortly after take-off from Somalia’s capital, the airline said Thursday.

“All passengers except one disembarked safely after aircraft landed at the airport,” Daallo Airlines, Djibouti’s national carrier, said in a statement. “Investigations are underway to ascertain the cause of one missing passenger.”

Aviation experts and the pilot who landed the plane safely in Mogadishu after the explosion on Tuesday have said they fear the blast was a bomb. There has been no official confirmation of the cause of the explosion.

The plane, operated by Daallo Airlines and flying from Mogadishu to Djibouti with 74 passengers, safely made an emergency landing on Tuesday. Police said two people onboard were injured.

The Serbian pilot has said he thought the blast, which ripped the fuselage from inside to out, had been an explosive device, according to reports in the Serbian newspaper Blic.

Pilot Vladimir Vodopivec, 64, told a friend he thought it was “a bomb,” without giving more details.

Photographs show a large hole — about a meter in diameter — just above the engines on the right wing, with streaks of soot on the plane.

Vodopivec added that the blast did not damage the navigation systems, and while cabin pressure was lost, he was able to guide the plane back safely to land at Mogadishu airport.

Video footage taken after the blast showed people having moved to the back of the plane with emergency oxygen masks dangling down as wind rushed around the main cabin, although most people appeared fairly calm.

Mogadishu airport is heavily fortified and adjoins the capital’s main base of the African Union mission to Somalia, the 22,000-strong force backing the government in the battle against Al-Qaeda-affiliated Shabab insurgents.

The insurgents have lost ground since being routed from Mogadishu in 2011 but continue to stage regular shooting and suicide attacks.

Last month they stormed a Kenyan army base at El-Adde in southwest Somalia, in the latest incident of an African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) base being overrun.

The Shabab have also staged attacks in Kenya, killing at least 67 people at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2013 and massacring 148 people at a university in Garissa in April 2015.

They have made no claim of carrying out a bomb attack on the plane.