Teen jet survivor returns to family

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, who gently embraced her and joked to lift her spirits.

Bahia Bakari, 14, 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 13 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. France's cooperation minister, Alain Joyandet, said the girl "was informed that her mother is missing. She is facing up to this event in a very brave way."

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.

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 San'a, Yemen, to Comoros where they planned to spend part of the summer with relatives. Her three siblings had stayed behind with her father.

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."

"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.

AP

(China Daily 07/03/2009 page16)