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The New York Times
Africa
Survivor Recounts 13
Hours in Ocean
By NICOLA CLARK and
SHARON OTTERMAN
From nytimes.com on
the Web, July 1, 2009
PARIS — The 14-year-old girl
who is the only known survivor of the crash of a Yemeni airliner 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 boat.
The girl, Baya Bakari, told her father, who then spoke to French Radio, that she
had been ejected from the plane as it crashed, 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, a French citizen
from Marseilles 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.”
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.
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
collar bone.
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.
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