Only survivor of plane crash held onto wreckage for hours
Published Thursday July 2nd, 2009
MORONI, Comoros - Despite a fractured collarbone, a teenage girl clung to the wreckage of a plane for more than 13 hours before rescuers found her floating in the Indian Ocean, authorities said.
The only known survivor of the crash, she was being flown back to Paris on Wednesday night.
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.
French officials late Wednesday retracted claims that one of the plane's black boxes had been found. French Commander Bertrand Mortemard de Boisse told The Associated Press that a signal detected from the debris of Yemenia Flight IY626 was from a distress beacon and not from one of the plane's black boxes.
The flight data and cockpit voice recorders in those black boxes are crucial to help investigators determine the cause of the crash off this former French colony.
An Associated Press reporter saw 14-year-old Bahia Bakari in a Comoros hospital Wednesday as she was visited by government officials. She was conscious with bruises on her face and gauze bandages on her right elbow and right foot.
Her hair was pulled back and she was covered by a blue blanket but she gamely shook the hand of Alain Joyandet, France's minister for international cooperation.
Her uncle, Joseph Yousouf, said Bahia also had a fracture on her collarbone.
"It is a true miracle. She is a courageous young girl," Joyandet said, adding that Bahia held onto a piece of the plane from 1:30 a.m Tuesday to 3:00 p.m., then signaled 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."
The girl was travelling with her mother, who is feared dead. They had left Paris on Monday night to see family in the Comoros.
"She's asking for her mother," Yousouf told the AP. For fear of upsetting Bahia, Yousouf told her that her mother is in the room next door.
Joyandet said the girl left Wednesday night on a chartered executive jet and would be put in a Paris hospital upon arrival.
The passengers were flying the last leg of a journey from Paris and Marseille to Comoros, with a stop in Yemen to change planes. Most of the passengers were from Comoros, sixty-six were French citizens.
The girl's father told French radio that his oldest daughter could "barely swim" but managed to hang on.
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