Comoros crash survivor returns to France as mourning begins (Roundup)

Jul 2, 2009, 12:50 GMT

Paris/Johannesburg - The only known survivor of the crash of a Yemenia Airbus A310 near the Comoros islands, 12-year-old Bahiya Bakary, arrived at Le Bourget airport near Paris Thursday as France prepared to commemorate the 152 people who died in the accident.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was scheduled to take part at an inter-denominational ceremony in memory of the crash victims Thursday afternoon at the Mosque of Paris.

In addition, Comoros has declared a period of national mourning, said Abdillah Mougni, a senior official in the transport ministry.

Earlier Thursday, the 'miracle girl,' as she has been dubbed, returned to France accompanied by several doctors and French Junior Minister for Development Alain Joyandet. She was greeted on the tarmac by her father, Kassim Bakary, and other family members.

Bahiya, who lost her mother in the crash, was immediately taken to a Paris hospital for treatment of her injuries, which include a fracture collarbone and a number of burns.

The girl is a French citizen of Comoran origin and turns 13 next month. She spent nearly 12 hours in the water after the crash, clinging to a piece of wreckage while around her other survivors lost their battle for life.

'I was just hanging on,' she told her father during their first telephone conversation after the crash. 'I heard people around me talking in the darkness. After a while I didn't hear any talking any more.'

The teenager's survival is all the more remarkable since, according to her father, she is unable to swim.

Joyandet said he was astonished by her 'physical strength and absolutely incredibly morale.'

The Airbus A310 was carrying 142 passengers and a crew of 11 when it plunged into the Indian Ocean Tuesday in bad weather.

Relatives of the victims have alleged that the plane was unsafe and should never have been allowed to fly.

The A310 was banned from landing in France in 2007 after French Civil Aviation Authority inspectors detected a number of irregularities.

However, a Yemenia company official said on Wednesday the plane's pilot did not issue a distress signal or report any mechanical problems.

Hassan al-Houthi, head of the Yemenia technical department, told reporters in Sana'a the pilot 'did not even have time to make an emergency call,' suggesting that the weather, rather than a mechanical problem, caused the crash.

As the search for victims and the plane wreckage entered a third day, the Comoros government formally launched its investigation into the cause of Tuesday's air disaster Thursday.

The transport ministry's Mougni told the German Press Agency dpa that France, which had 66 nationals on the plane, is participating in the investigation along with Yemen and the United States, which supplied the engines of the Airbus 310.

No bodies of victims have been recovered yet. Several were spotted in the water shortly after the crash but strong winds dispersed them over a wide area.

The controversy over the condition of the aircraft has moved French Junior Minister for Transport Dominique Bussereau to call for the establishment of a worldwide 'black list' of carriers who fly unsafe planes.

'We have noticed, unfortunately, that in general the creation of a European black list ... has led carriers in some distant countries to use the best aircraft to serve Europe,' Bussereau said in an interview published Thursday in the daily Le Figaro.

Bussereau also said that after the 2007 inspection of the A310 that crashed, 'some 20 observations were passed on to Yemenia' about the state of the aircraft.

Defects found included insufficient pressure to work the emergency exit doors, material in the plane's hold that was inadequtely fastened, oxygen tanks that were not fastened down and that the plane's papers were not up-to-date, he said.