Yemeni plane crash survivor returns to Paris
Teenage girl clung to wreckage for 13 hours
A teenage girl believed to be the lone survivor of this week's Yemeni plane crash headed home to Paris on Wednesday after being treated in a Comoros hospital for a fractured collarbone.
'Papa, we saw the plane going down in the water. I was in the water, I could hear people talking, but I couldn't see anyone. I was in the dark, I couldn't see a thing on top of that, Daddy. I can't swim well and I held on to something, but I don't really know what.'
— Crash survivor Bahia Bakari
Bahia Bakari, 14, left the island nation on a chartered executive jet, said Alain Joyandet, France's minister for international co-operation. She is expected to be hospitalized immediately in Paris.
She had clung to the aircraft's debris for more than 13 hours before she was rescued in the Indian Ocean. The Yemenia Airbus 310 jet was carrying 153 people when it went down in howling winds early Tuesday in the sea north of the Comoros Islands.
Earlier on Wednesday, Joyandet visited Bahia in a Comoros hospital where she was conscious, with bruises on her face and a gauze bandage on her elbow.
"It is a true miracle. She is a courageous young girl," Joyandet said at the hospital. He said she held on to a piece of the plane from 1:30 a.m. Tuesday to 3 p.m., then signalled a passing boat, which rescued her.
"She really showed an absolutely incredible physical and moral strength," he said. "She is physically out of danger. She is evidently very traumatized," he said. "The search is continuing. No other survivors have been found for the moment."
Her uncle, Joseph Yousouf, said Bahia had a fractured collarbone. She had left Paris on Monday night with her mother, who is feared dead, to see family in the Comoros.
"She's asking for her mother," Yousouf told The Associated Press. For fear of upsetting Bahia, Yousouf told her that her mother is in the room next door.
Equipment faults reported
The girl's father told French radio that Bahia was "fragile" and could "barely swim," but managed to hang on. Kassim Bakari said he spoke with his oldest daughter by phone after Tuesday's crash.
He said she was ejected and found herself beside the plane.
"She couldn't feel anything, and found herself in the water. She heard people speaking around her but she couldn't see anyone in the darkness," Bakari said. "She's a very timid girl. I never thought she would escape like that."
Sgt. Said Abdilai told Europe 1 radio that Bahia was too weak to grasp the life ring rescuers threw to her, so he jumped into the sea to get her. He said rescuers gave the trembling girl warm water with sugar.
The crash a few kilometres off the island nation came two years after aviation officials reported equipment faults with the plane, an aging Airbus A310 flying the last leg of a Yemenia Airways flight from Paris and Marseille to the Comoros, with a stop in Yemen to change planes.
Most of the passengers were from the Comoros, a former French colony. Sixty-six on board were French nationals.
Turbulence was believed to be a factor in the crash, the Yemeni Embassy in Washington said.
Late Wednesday local time, French officials retracted claims that one of the plane's black boxes had been located. French Cmdr. Bertrand Mortemard de Boisse told The Associated Press that a signal detected from the debris of Yemenia Flight 626 was from a distress beacon and not from one of the plane's black boxes.
The catastrophe has prompted an outcry in Comoros, where residents have long complained of a lack of seatbelts on Yemenia flights and planes so overcrowded that passengers had to stand in the aisles.