July 10, 2003	Thursday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 9,1424

KHARTOUM, July 9: The little Sudanese boy who emerged the sole survivor of a horrific plane crash which killed 115 people could talk and drink juices Wednesday as he recovered in a hospital here, doctors and relatives said.

Doctors were mystified as to how three-year-old Mohamed al-Fateh, who was burned and lost part of a leg, had survived Tuesday’s crash near Sudan’s Red Sea coast, speculating that he was thrown clear of the plane on a piece of wreckage and may have landed on a bush.

The Sudan Airways Boeing 737 was destroyed in a ball of fire as it attempted to land back at Port Sudan after apparently suffering an engine problem soon after takeoff.

“Mohamed is okay. He speaks and drinks juices, thanks to God,” his uncle Abdel Hadi Ibrahim Abu-Saba’ah told AFP after seeing the boy in the intensive care ward of the police hospital here.

Mohamed “is in a stable condition, with plastered burns to the face, neck, right hand and right leg,” said Abu-Saba’ah, the brother of the boy’s mother, Lubna Ibrahim Abu-Saba’ah, who died in the crash.

He said Mohamed was returning with his mother to Khartoum after they attended the wedding of Lubna’s cousin in Port Sudan.

State television showed Mohamed in the arms of a doctor, enveloped in a sheet and his left leg wrapped in a bandage, while his face appeared calm but covered with dark spots, perhaps burns or bruises.

He was treated first in a hospital in Port Sudan before being brought to the intensive care unit of Saheroun, a private branch of Khartoum’s police hospital, relatives and hospital sources said.

Doctor Abdel Samei Abdallah al-Tayeb told AFP that 14 to 15 percent of Mohamed’s body is burnt, including the face, the right thigh, the right hand and the perineum, the area between the anus and the scrotum.

“As the perineum is burnt, the body cannot excrete and therefore we have to do an operation to divert the excretory outlet,” said Tayeb, adding that they would do the operation either Wednesday evening or Thursday.—AFP