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A relieved Kassim Bakari (centre) seen with Dominique Bussereau, France transport minister at Le Bourget airport.
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3rd July, 2009
LE BOURGET: A young girl believed to be the only survivor of an Indian Ocean plane crash flew back to Paris from the Comoros Islands on Thursday to the waiting arms of her father.
Bahia Bakari, 14, returned to France on a plane carrying a government minister and other French officials. The Falcon-900 jet with medical facilities aboard left the archipelago nation of the Comoros, 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 plane wreckage before she was rescued.
The other 152 people on the plane, including her mother, are presumed dead. Bahia’s father, Kassim, when met said 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.”
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,” France’s government minister for cooperation, Alain Joyandet, said at a news conference at the airport.
When found hanging on to a piece of the plane, Bahia was suffering from hypothermia, a broken collarbone and bruises to her face, her elbow and her foot.
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 and you know the rest.”
The minister noted that 152 other people on the plane are still missing and vowed “the Comoros and France are arm-in-arm to find out everything that happened.”
Off the coast of the Comoros islands, French and U.S. ships directed the search for survivors, bodies and plane 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.
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.
The London-based International Federation of Air Line Pilots Association, said the plane may have been attempting a go-around in rough weather for another approach when it hit the sea.
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