Jet victim clung to debris — and life — in sea

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 on board 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 in a suburb 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, I couldn't see a thing.'"

Bakari fingered his wife Aziza's old passport as he recalled the final moments before she and his daughter boarded the plane in Paris.

"When we arrived at the airport, I kissed both, then my wife turned around, she looked at me and she waved," he said. "That was the last time I saw my wife alive. My daughter... I will see her again I hope, but for my wife it was the last time."

The passengers on the downed plane, an aging Airbus 310, were flying the last leg of a journey from Paris and Marseille to Comoros, with a stop in Yemen to change planes. Most on board were from Comoros and 66 were French citizens. Severe turbulence was believed to be a factor in the crash, Yemen's embassy in Washington said.

For many, Bahia's survival was nothing short of miraculous.

On Wednesday, more than a dozen people — most of them government officials — crowded into a small room in Moroni's El Maaruf Hospital where Bahia lay curled in a fetal position, covered by a blue blanket.