Girl, 14, clung to life on jet debris off Comoros Island

PARIS — When rescuers saw Bahia Bakari, 14, she was clinging to wreckage in rough seas, surrounded by floating corpses and debris from the Yemeni airliner that crashed early Tuesday off the island nation of Comoros.

On Wednesday night, Bahia — hospitalized and suffering from scratches, bruises and at least one fracture — was asking for her mother, who had been on the same flight, according to an uncle who had seen the girl. He said he told her, for now, that her mother was in the next room.

But in an almost miraculous tale of luck and endurance, Bahia apparently is the only survivor of an air disaster that left all 152 other people on board dead.

"She told me that she remembered when the flight attendants asked the passengers to fasten their seat belts, and then she remembers being in the water for hours before the lifeboat came," said the uncle, Joseph Yousouf, interviewed by telephone from El Maarouf Hospital in Moroni, the capital of Comoros.

Bahia's physical injuries appear improbably light: a broken collarbone, abrasions, bruises. "She is in a good shape; she is able to talk; she can't wait to go back to France," Yousouf said. "I noticed that she had scratches on her feet and that her left eye hurts her a lot, but she can walk and speaks clearly."

He said she was flying overnight to France, where she would be hospitalized near the family's home in a southern Paris suburb, Corbeil-Essonnes. There, her father, Kassim Bakari, tried to figure out how to tell her and her three siblings, ages 10, 8 and 2, that their mother was believed to be dead.

"Who's going to tell her? I don't know who is going to tell her this," he told RTL radio. "I can't tell her this."

Bakari said she was "a timid girl" and not a good swimmer, but that she managed to cling to floating debris for hours. "She said, 'Papa, I don't know what happened,' " he told the television station i-Tele. " 'I fell into the water, and I could hear people talking around me. It was dark, and I couldn't see anything.' "

But she eventually saw a boat and signaled to it. One rescuer, Sgt. Said Abdilai, told Europe 1 radio that she was too weak to grab the life ring thrown to her, so he jumped into the sea for her. The trembling girl was given warm water with sugar, he said.

There is some confusion over how long she was in the water. Her uncle said five hours, while the French minister for international cooperation, Alain Joyandet, said 13-½ hours, according to The Associated Press.

The flight, operated by the airline Yemenia, took off from Paris, stopped in Marseille and changed planes in the Yemeni capital, San'a, before a stop in Djibouti en route to Moroni, Comoros, a former French colony. French radio reported that the plane lost radio contact with air traffic controllers five minutes before the crash. The Airbus A310-300 was on its final descent in heavy winds, Yemeni authorities have said.

The jet used for the flight's final legs was 19 years old and had been banned from flying in France in 2007, according to the French transportation minister, Dominique Bussereau. Yemenia officials said the plane's faults were minor and had been corrected, and the crash was due to stormy weather, not to a technical fault. They said the plane was serviced most recently May 2.

Early reports that one of the plane's black boxes had been found were denied. Yemenia and the French Office for Investigation and Analysis, which investigates air accidents, were sending investigators, accompanied by Airbus specialists.

The airline said payments of about $28,000 would be provided to each of the victims' families. Travel and lodging costs also would be paid for those who chose to go to Moroni.

Airbus said the plane had accumulated 51,900 flight hours over 17,300 flights. It said the plane had been operated by Yemenia since 1999.

In Paris, angry Comorans protested the crash and delayed a Yemenia flight to San'a. In Marseille, protesters said they had warned French authorities repeatedly that the Yemenia flights were overcrowded and unsafe and sometimes even lacked seat belts, Agence France-Presse reported. Last year, French officials set up a group, SOS Travel to Comoros, to press for improved conditions.

Mourners massed in front of the Comoran Consulate in Marseille, believed to have a Comoran population of about 80,000. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is expected to attend a service for crash victims at a Paris mosque today.

New York Times reporter Maia de la Baume contributed to this report.