Plane with 153 people on board crashes off Comoros

MORONI, Comoros — A Yemeni jetliner carrying 153 people crashed in the Indian Ocean as it came in for a landing during howling winds on the island nation of Comoros. Yemeni officials said a teenage girl survived.

The crash came two years after aviation officials reported faults with the plane, an Airbus 310 flying the last leg of a journey from Paris and Marseille to Comoros, with a stop in Yemen to change planes. Most of the passengers were from Comoros, a former French colony. Sixty-six on board were French nationals.

Khaled el-Kaei, the head of Yemenia airline's public relations office, said a 14-year-old girl survived the crash. And Yemen's embassy in Washington issued a statement saying a young girl survived and was taken to a hospital. It also said five bodies were recovered.

There were earlier reports that a 5-year-old boy survived. El-Kaei said that was not known and the airline had lost contact with its office in Comoros because of bad weather.

Yemeni civil aviation deputy chief Mohammed Abdul Qader said the flight data recorder had not been found and it was too early to speculate on the cause of the crash. But he said the wind was 40 miles per hour (61 kph) as the plane was landing in the middle of the night.

"The weather was very bad," he said, adding the windy conditions hampered rescue efforts.

The Yemenia plane was the second Airbus to crash into the sea this month. An Air France Airbus A330-200 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, killing all 228 people on board, as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

The Comoros is an archipelago of three main islands situated 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) south of Yemen, between Africa's southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar. It is a former French colony of 700,000 people.

In France, school vacations began this week and many on the plane were heading home to visit.

Gen. Bruno de Bourdoncle de Saint-Salvy, the senior commander for French forces in the southern Indian Ocean, said the Airbus 310 crashed in deep waters about 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) north of the Comoran coast and 21 miles (34 kilometers) from the Moroni airport.

French aviation inspectors found a "number of faults" during a 2007 inspection of the plane that went down, French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said on i-Tele television Tuesday.