Moldova

Sole Survivor of Comoros Crash Arrives in Paris

July 02, 2009

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The only known survivor of this week's Yemeni airliner crash off Comoros has arrived in Paris on a government plane.

Bahia Bakari, 14, landed Thursday and was met by her father at the airport.

He told reporters he is happy to see his daughter, but sad for his wife, who is among the 152 other passengers still missing, and presumed dead.

A French official says Bakari clung to a piece of floating debris for some 12 hours until she was rescued.

She has a broken collarbone and other minor injuries, but is otherwise healthy.

Bakari had been traveling with her mother from France to visit family when the Yemenia Air flight went down in the Indian Ocean early Tuesday.

French officials are still searching for clues to the plane crash.

French and Yemeni officials said early Wednesday that a signal from one of the so-called "black boxes" had been detected. But the French defense ministry now says that signal was from one of the plane's distress beacons.

Earlier this week, Bakari's father said he had spoken to his daughter on the phone and reported that she heard people speaking after the crash, indicating that some other people initially survived.

Comorans in France angered by the crash tried to block passengers from boarding another Yemenia Air flight in Paris Wednesday. The flight eventually took off with only 60 of a scheduled 160 passengers on board.

Yemenia Air says it will give about $28,000 to each family that lost a loved one in Tuesday's crash. It calls the compensation preliminary.

Rescue efforts continued off Comoros Wednesday but hopes of finding more survivors have faded.

Sixty-six French nationals were on the flight. Yemeni officials have said there were also nationals from Yemen, Comoros, Canada, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, and the Philippines on board the Airbus 310.

The cause of the crash remains unclear. Yemeni civil aviation spokesman, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Kader, has said winds were high at the time of the crash, and the plane was attempting to land in the middle of the night.

France's Transportation Minister, Dominique Bussereau, says French inspectors detected a number of faults with the airplane during a 2007 inspection and that Yemenia Air was being subjected to closer inspections.

The Yemenia Air plane is the second Airbus plane to crash this month. An Air France Airbus A330, traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean June 1, killing all 228 people onboard.

The Comoros is made up of three islands about 300 kilometers northwest of Madagascar, in the Mozambique channel.

VOA News