MORONI, Comoros — The lone survivor of a Yemeni jetliner crash, who clung to wreckage for 13 hours before being rescued, lay in a hospital bed with a broken collarbone Wednesday, asking for little — except for a chance to see her mother.
But relatives said 14-year-old Bahia Bakari was too traumatized to be told her mother was feared dead, along with 151 others aboard the Yemenia airways flight.
“I have told her that her mother is in the next room,” the girl’s uncle, Joseph Yousouf, told The Associated Press outside a hospital in this former French colony, where the jetliner was attempting to land in fierce winds before dawn Tuesday when it slammed into the Indian Ocean.
He said the girl was coherent and asking for food.
“They were coming to Comoros for vacation,” Yousouf said of Bahia, who lived with her parents and three younger siblings outside Paris. “She was going to be staying with her grandmother.”
The girl’s father, Kassim Bakari, described his daughter as “fragile” and said she could “barely swim,” but still managed to hang on for hours.
Her account of the crash aftermath seemed to indicate others survived the initial impact.
“I spoke to her this afternoon . . . and I asked her what happened,” Bakari said from his home south of Paris. “She said, ‘Papa, we saw the plane going down in the water. I was in the water, I could hear people talking, but I couldn’t see anyone. I was in the dark.’ ”
Bahia was flown home to Paris late Wednesday aboard a chartered executive jet and was to be taken to a hospital for further treatment, officials said.
French and U.S. recovery crews, meanwhile, continued to search for the plane’s black boxes in deep waters off Comoros after detecting a distress beacon. Officials hope the flight data and cockpit voice recorders will provide clues to the cause of the crash. Once retrieved, they will be taken to France for analysis, Yemenia officials said.
It was not immediately clear which section of the passenger cabin the girl had been sitting in. But if the plane flew into the water at speed, the impact damage to the fuselage would have been so violent and extensive that no part of the cabin would have been safer than any other, experts said.
Hassan al-Hawthi, the head of maintenance at Yemenia, told reporters Wednesday that air-traffic controllers had instructed the pilot to change course because of the strong wind. He said there was no distress call before the crash.
The London-based International Federation of Air Line Pilots Association said the pilot may have been trying to go around for another approach when the plane hit the sea.
Most of the passengers on the aging Airbus 310 were from Comoros, and 66 were French citizens.
