The 14-year-old girl who is the only known survivor of the crash of a Yemeni airliner on Tuesday clung to wreckage in the Indian Ocean for more than 13 hours before her rescue, shivering in the darkness until she was able to weakly signal a search b
oat.
The girl, Bahia Bakari, told her father, who then spoke to French Radio, that she had been ejected from the plane as it fell, and found herself beside the plane in the water. There were other survivors in those first moments after the crash, but one by one, they apparently died.
“She couldn’t feel anything,” her father, Kassim Bakari said, according to news reports. “She heard people speaking around her, but she couldn’t see anyone in the darkness.”
The outlines of the miraculous story of how one teenage girl from the southern suburbs of Paris described by her father as a “fragile” girl who could “barely swim,” managed to survive the crash of Yemenia Airways Flight 626 off the Comoros islands, began to emerge on Wednesday, as reporters caught glimpses of her, bruised but conscious, speaking to officials from a hospital bed in the city of Moroni, near where the plane went down.
There were 153 people aboard the Airbus 310-300— 142 passengers and 11 crew members — when it crashed in heavy winds on approach to the airport in Moroni, the capital of the Comoros. Officials said that the search for survivors continued in the deep waters around the crash site, nine miles off the coast of the island, but they said that heavy winds and rough seas diminished the chances of finding anyone alive.
Despite initial reports Wednesday that one of the plane’s flight recorders had been found, a French official said that it now appeared that the signal was from a distress beacon, not one of the missing “black boxes,” the Agence-France Presse reported.
Yemenia Airways Flight 626 originated in Paris on Monday aboard an Airbus A330 and stopped in Marseille before continuing to Sana, Yemen, where passengers and the crew switched planes to an Airbus A310-300. French air safety authorities have said that jet was found to have “faults” in a 2007 inspection and had not returned to French airspace since.
Miss Bakari, who is Comoran descent, was traveling to Moroni with her mother, her father told French radio Wednesday. The Agence France Presse said that it spoke with Miss Bakari’s father at their home in Corbeil Essonnes, a southern Parisian suburb.
Sixty-six French citizens were on the flight, and Alain Joyandet, France’s minister for international cooperation, went to Moroni to assist authorities there. After visiting Miss Bakari in the hospital, he called her survival “a true miracle” and relayed what she had said about her ordeal.
“She held onto a piece of the plane from 1:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. She signaled to a passing boat, and it was able to pick her up,” Mr. Joyandet said.
“She really showed incredible physical and moral strength,” he said, adding that she was expected to be transferred Wednesday night to a Paris hospital.
As night broke into day, and Miss Bakari waited for rescue, she grew weaker. One of her rescuers, Sgt. Said Abdilai, told Europe 1 radio that Miss Bakari was too weak to grasp the life ring rescuers threw to her, so he jumped into the sea to get her, The A.P. reported. He said rescuers gave the trembling girl warm water with sugar.
Though she did not speak to reporters herself, Miss Bakari was glimpsed by an Associated Press reporter though a hospital window with bruises on her face and a gauze bandage on her elbow. Said Mohammed, a nurse at El Mararouf hospital in Moroni, said she was doing well, The A.P. said. Her uncle, who saw her in the hospital, told The A.P. that she had a fractured collarbone.
In Paris, a group of French youths of Comoran descent, angry about the crash, formed a human chain in front of the Yemenia check-in desk at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on Wednesday morning in an attempt to block passengers from boarding a flight for Sana.
News reports said around 60 passengers failed to check in, while around 100 people did board the flight, which took off as scheduled. A separate Yemenia flight that was due to depart for Sana Wednesday evening from Marseille has been delayed until Thursday, a spokesman for the Marseille airport said. He said the airline did not give a reason for the delay.
