Teenage airplane crash survivor returns home

07-03-2009 | AP

The 14-year-old clung to wreckage for 14 hours. Her mother died in the crash

Panama Star LE BOURGET, FRANCE. A young girl believed to be the only survivor of an Indian Ocean plane crash flew back to Paris on Thursday 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 formerFrench colony, and arrived at Le Bourget airport just north of Paris.

Yemenia Flight 626 crashed Tuesday morning off Comoros amid heavy winds, and Bahia 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.

The French air accident investigation agency BEA sent a team of investigators and Airbus experts to Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) south of Yemen, between Africa's southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar. France's transport minister, Dominique Bussereau, was quoted as saying Thursday in the Le Figaro daily that "worrying anomalies" in the crashed Airbus A310 jet included broken seats for crew and passengers, out-of-date operation manuals, insufficient pressure on emergency exit doors and unrestrained equipment in the baggage hold.