Comoros crash survivor returns to family in Paris

[July 02, 2009]  LE BOURGET, France (AP) -- A young girl believed to be the only survivor of an Indian Ocean plane crash flew back to Paris on Thursday to the waiting arms of her father, who gently embraced her and joked to lift her spirits.

Bahia Bakari, 14, returned to France from the Comoros Islands on a plane carrying a government minister and other French officials. The Falcon-900 jet with medical facilities left the archipelago nation, a former French colony, and arrived at Le Bourget airport just north of Paris.

Yemenia Flight 626 crashed Tuesday morning off Comoros amid heavy winds, and Bahia, described by her father as a fragile girl who could barely swim, spent over 13 hours in the water clinging to wreckage before she was rescued. She was found suffering from hypothermia, a fractured collarbone and bruises to her face, her elbow and her foot.

The other 152 people on the plane, including her mother, are presumed dead. France's cooperation minister, Alain Joyandet, said the girl "was informed that her mother is missing. She is facing up to this event in a very brave way."

Bahia's father, Kassim, met her as she arrived, saying he was relieved and overjoyed to see his daughter even as he mourned his wife.

"It was very powerful," he said of his reunion with Bahia. He said he asked her,"'How are you? Was the return trip OK?' ... We joked a little, the two of us."

"I took her in my arms and I embraced her, but not too strongly because her collarbone is injured," he said later on France-24 television.

Several other family members joined the airport reunion before an ambulance took the girl to the Armand-Trousseau Children's Hospital in eastern Paris.

"In the midst of the mourning, there is Bahia. It is a miracle, it is an absolutely extraordinary battle for survival," Joyandet said at a news conference at the airport. "It's an enormous message that she sends to the world ... almost nothing is impossible."

Bahia, the eldest of four children, had boarded a plane in Paris with her mother, Aziza, on Monday morning for a long journey via Marseille and San'a, Yemen, to Comoros where they planned to spend part of the summer with relatives. Her three siblings had stayed behind with her father.

Joyandet said the girl recounted her ordeal a bit to him.

"She says instructions were given to passengers and that then she felt something like electricity ... as if she had been a bit electrocuted," Joyandet said. "And suddenly there was this big sound. She found herself in the water."

"She said she was afraid when she couldn't see her mama," her father said on France-24. "She was a bit panicked."

At one point, he said, Bahia fell asleep, clinging to a piece of debris.

With so many others still missing, Joyandet vowed "the Comoros and France are arm-in-arm to find out everything that happened."

The French air accident investigation agency BEA sent a team of investigators and Airbus experts to Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) south of Yemen, between Africa's southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar.

France's transport minister, Dominique Bussereau, was quoted as saying Thursday in the Le Figaro daily that "worrying anomalies" in the crashed Airbus A310 jet included broken seats for crew and passengers, out-of-date operation manuals, insufficient pressure on emergency exit doors and unrestrained equipment in the baggage hold. French aviation authorities flagged the problems with the plane during a 2007 inspection.

Off the coast of the Comoros islands, French and U.S. ships directed the search for survivors, bodies and wreckage Thursday, even as hope in finding anyone alive in the choppy seas faded.

"Up to this moment, there have been no bodies, nor any other survivor," said Jean Youssouf, director-general of El Maarouf Hospital in Moroni. "Do we continue to hope to find survivors? Yes, we will continue to hope."

In the coastal town of Mitsamiouli, about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from Moroni, the capital of Comoros, rescue boats went to sea. Dozens of Red Crescent tents were set up on shore and about 100 French, American, Yemeni and Comoran military personnel gathered to aid the search effort.

Ramoulati Ben Ali, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent Society of Comoros, said because of the "the wind, the rough sea, we have not been able to recover any bodies."

The search results "have been disappointing," admitted Bertrand Mortemard de Boisse, commandant for the French military in the southern Indian Ocean. He said currents and winds were scattering the debris and bodies.

A 16-member U.S. search-and-rescue team arrived in Moroni late Wednesday after being asked to come by the Comoros government, a U.S. diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

He declined to give further details.

Two French military ships and an Italian frigate were diverted from anti-piracy patrols in the region to help with the search.

[Associated Press; By MICHEL EULER and TOM MALITI]

Maliti reported from Moroni, Comoros. Yoann Guilloux in Saint-Denis de la Reunion also contributed to this report.

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