Sole survivor of Yemenia flight 626 clash is flown home

LE BOURGET, FRANCE // A young girl believed to be the only survivor of an Indian Ocean plane crash flew back to Paris yesterday to the waiting arms of her father. Bahia Bakari, 12, 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 on Tuesday morning off Comoros amid heavy winds, and Bahia, described by her father as a fragile girl who could barely swim, spent over 10 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. Television station France 2 carried a brief interview with Bahia on the plane. She appeared dazed and gave mostly one-word answers. Asked how she felt, the teenager, who was unable to open one of her eyes fully, replied faintly: "Well." When asked if she is worried, she said: "A little bit, a little bit".

One of the medical team accompanying her on the flight told France 2 that Bahia had not talked to them about what happened. 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," France's co-operation minister, Alain Joyandet, said at a news conference at the airport. "It's an enormous message that she sends to the world ... almost nothing is impossible."

He said she "was informed that her mother is missing. She is facing up to this event in a very brave way". 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 Sana'a, Yemen, to Comoros where they planned to spend part of the summer with relatives. Her three siblings had stayed behind with her father. Mr 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," Mr 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, Mr 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 2,900km south of Yemen, between Africa's south-eastern coast and the island of Madagascar.

France's transport minister, Dominique Bussereau, was quoted as saying yesterday 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. Yemenia's lawyer in France said it was too early to say that the plane's condition was the cause of the accident.

* Associated Press