KHARTOUM, Nov 18: An airlift from Khartoum of almost 1,400 sick, elderly and other “extremely vulnerable” South Sudanese has been suspended after a plane crash, the International Organisation for Migration said on Sunday.

Miraculously, none of the 49 South Sudanese aboard was hurt when the aircraft crashed late last week on landing at the airstrip in Aweil, in South Sudan's Northern Bahr El Ghazal state, said Jill Helke, chief of IOM's Sudan mission.

“The plane is probably a write-off,” she said, but the passengers were fine and continued to their final destinations in South Sudan after being examined by a doctor who was on the same flight.

The airlift, which began on November 6, moved more than 1,000 South Sudanese to Aweil before the accident deprived the operation of its only plane.

“It is suspended,” she said of the operation.

The extremely vulnerable group includes unaccompanied children, the disabled, and people whose health is at risk if they keep living in the open or make the difficult journey south by road, the IOM said in an earlier statement. They are among 30,000-40,000 South Sudanese encamped around the Sudanese capital awaiting transport to the South, which became independent in July last year.—AFP