A Sudanese airliner crashed minutes after its captain reported tech-nical problems following takeoff yesterday, killing 116 people, officials said. The only survivor was a 2-year-old boy.

　　The Boeing 737 had just left Port Sudan on the northeastern Red Sea coast for the capital, Khartoum. The crash occurred at about 4 am in an uninhabited area outside the airport, about 660 kilometers northeast of Khartoum.

　　"In his attempt to make an emergency landing, the plane hit the ground and crashed, killing all people on board except that child," Sudan Airways director Ismail Zumrawy told state-run radio.

　　The child was rushed to hospital in good condition, state airline officials said.

　　Eleven crew members and 105 passengers died, among them eight foreigners, state radio said were three Indian nationals, one Briton, a Chinese, an Ethiopian, a United Arab Emirates citizen and a woman whose nationality was unknown.

　　Also among those killed were a senior air force official and a member of parlia-ment, the radio report said.

　　A local journalist said the bodies were so badly burned that they were being buried on the spot, two or three to a coffin.

　　"Bodies were scattered everywhere, burned and charred and could be seen all over the place," Muhammad Osman Babikir of El-Sahafa daily said by phone. "There was no way of performing the Muslim ritual of washing the bodies. It was horrible."

　　The bodies of the dead had been burned, and further details on the passengers were not immediately available.

　　A team of experts was headed to the scene to investigate the cause.

　　Sudan has suffered few passenger-plane accidents in recent years, but several crashes of military aircraft amid a 20-year-old civil war.

　　Two years ago, a military-plane crash in the war-torn south killed the country's deputy defense minister and 13 other high-ranking officers.

　　In 1996, a Sudanese passenger jet crashed during a sandstorm while trying to make an emergency landing outside Khartoum, killing 50 people. A decade before that, the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army shot down a Sudan Airways aircraft shortly after it took off, killing all 70 people on board.

　　The rebels have been fighting for greater autonomy for the mainly Christian and animist south from Sudan's Islamic government. Fighting has raged mainly in the south.