Yemeni Plane Crash:Survivor of yemenia airlines tells father “dad i don’t know what happened”
Teen air crash survivor clung to debris in ocean for 12 hours
The 14-year-old girl believed to be the only survivor of a Yemenia jetliner crash off Comoros was thrown from the plane amid darkness, she tells her father. The 14-year-old girl believed to be the lone survivor of a yemini jetliner crash in the Indian Ocean was thrown from the plane and into the waves, where she heard voices but saw no one in the darkness, her father told a French radio station Wednesday. “She is a very, very shy girl. I never thought she would survive like that,” Kassim Bakari said of his daughter, Bahia, in an interview with French RTL radio from his suburban Paris home. “I can’t say that it’s a miracle. I can say that it is God’s will.
The French government announced early Wednesday that search teams had picked up a signal coming from one of the plane’s “black box” recorders. But it later reversed that assertion, saying the electronic impulses detected were from the plane’s distress signals. The two black boxes — the cockpit recorder and the flight data recorder — are crucial to determining what caused a crash. French army spokesman Christophe Prazuck said the black boxes were probably several hundred yards beneath the ocean surface and “inaccessible to human divers.” The Yemeni government said preliminary indications were that bad weather may have caused the yemini airliner to plunge into the sea as it approached the airport in Moroni. Flight 626 had left the Yemeni capital, Sana, carrying mostly Comorans and French nationals. Many of them had originated their journey in Paris and flew to Marseille before stopping and changing aircraft in Sana. European aviation officials have said that the plane operated by Yemenia, Yemen’s national carrier, was barred from French airports two years ago after “irregularities” were discovered in a safety review. A European Union official said the airline crashed, last year had passed safety requirements and was not blacklisted in Europe. Anger against the carrier continued at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris among young protesters, many of them of Comoran descent, who tried to block passengers from a Yemenia flight. French media reported that about 60 passengers did not check in but that the flight departed with 100 passengers. Comoran Vice President and Transport Minister Idi Nadhoim scolded French authorities for not warning Comoros about the Airbus A310’s questionable safety record. “I wish the French could have informed us about any irregularities with this plane,” he said in a telephone interview with France 24 television. “What is this? Discrimination between French passengers that have to be protected in France and those French people who are left to fly in these kinds of planes?” “She clung to a piece of debris from the plane for 12 hours,” French Cooperation Secretary Alain Joyandet told France Info radio. Later in the day he told reporters she was en route home to Paris. “She signaled to a passing boat, and it was able to pick her up. She really showed incredible physical and moral strength,the only survivor of yemini plane crash.”
