Toddler only survivor in air crash

A child has survived an air crash that killed all 116 of the other passengers and crew.

The Boeing 737 crashed shortly after taking off from Port Sudan today. The disaster has been attributed so far to unspecified " technical failure".

It was not immediately known if foreigners were among the 105 passengers and 11 crew who died.

Astonishingly, the twoyearold child is in good condition after being rushed to hospital, a spokesman for the Red Sea provincial government, Salah Ali Ahmed, said on Sudanese national television.

The airliner took off from the Red Sea coastal airport at about 4am local time (0100 GMT).

It was on an internal flight to the capital, Khartoum, when its captain reported he was in trouble.

"But fate was quicker," the director of Sudan Airways, Ismail Zumrawy, told the official Sudan News Agency.

Mr Ahmed said the plane crashed in an uninhabited area about 3.5 miles from the airport, 410 miles north-east of Khartoum.

The official spokesman ruled out bad weather as the cause of the crash.

Sudanese State Minister for Civil Aviation Mohammed Hassan el-Bahi said a team of experts would be sent to the scene to investigate the cause, the news agency reported.

The bodies of the dead had been burned, Mr Ahmed told television viewers.