The Jomo Kenyatta International Airport was ordered to close Wednesday after a blaze that reached the international arrivals area.
The huge fire shut down the busiest airport in Kenya and has affected not only passengers but cargo as well. Officials confirmed Wednesday that only emergency landings are allowed. The fire happened when flights from Europe were scheduled to arrive at Jomo Kenyatta at around 5 a.m.
Officials of the airport say they were able to contain the fire but there's no news when Jomo Kenyatta will reopen.
The airport located in Embakasi caters to over 16,000 passengers daily, according to reports but these passengers have been rerouted to Mombasa. In 2011 alone, it served 5,803,635 passengers.
The blaze happened after the airport started having problems with a fuel pump resulting to flights being diverted to other airports in the region, Reuters say.
An eyewitness who lives in the Kenyan capital said black smoke could be seen even miles away.
While Wednesday is the anniversary of the bombings that happened in American embassy in Kenya that happened in the late 90s, Kenya's Boniface Mwaniki -the country's counterterror boss told reporters that there is a need to wait for an investigation to ensue.
Although there is still no word from the counterterror agency in Kenya, word is going around in the Kenyan capital that the fire is connected to the coordinated bombings of two American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in the year 1998.
It took the fire department hours before they could extinguish the fire, says an eyewitness. An aid worker from the United States, Katie Price, told reporters Wednesday that she and her fellow passengers were asked to remain inside the aircraft for several hours before they were led to the cargo area where the Kenyan airport made a makeshift immigration assistance hall.
No casualties were reported but Price confirmed on a phone interview with the NY Times that the damage, "..looked like it would be hard to repair."
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