Paris/Johannesburg - The trawl for victims in Tuesday's Yemen Airways (Yemenia) crash off the Comoros islands continued for a second day Wednesday as the sole known survivor of the disaster recovered in hospital, and officials said they had located one of the plane's black boxes. Bakary Bahiya, 14, is still the only person known to have survived the Airbus A310's plunge into the ocean off the coast of Grande Comore island Tuesday with 153 people on board.
The teenager of Comoran origin, whose mother was also on the flight and who was found in the water clinging to wreckage in a state of extreme exhaustion Tuesday, was said by a doctor at a hospital in the Comoran capital Moroni to be recovering well.
"She seems very calm, compared to the shock she has suffered. She has a fracture of the collar bone that we are treating but nothing very serious," a doctor at El-Marouf hospital was quoted by al-Watan, a local newspaper, as saying.
After being called off overnight because of bad weather, the search for bodies and the wreckage, including the two black boxes, one of which a French government minister said had been located, continued Wednesday.
France's junior cooperation minister Alain Joyandet said a signal from one of the black boxes, which store information about the flight, had been picked up. Mohamed Soilih, spokesman at the crisis centre in Moroni, said a black box had been located but not retrieved.
French divers and a French patrol boat joined the search on Wednesday. France has contributed a military transport plane and two navy vessels with materials and personnel.
A US military transport plane was also scanning the area, Soilih said.
Like many of the passengers, the survivor (whose given name, Bahiya, means Hope in English), was travelling back to Comoros to visit family. Most of the 141 passengers were Comorans or French-Comorans.
France has criticized Yemenia, saying it banned the ill-fated Airbus from its airspace after detecting faults in the plane two years ago.
The Comoros government took issue with France for not sharing its concerns about the aircraft.
"The French should have informed us about all the problems this aircraft had," Comoros Islands Vice President Idi Nadhoim told French media.
At a press conference in Sana'a Wednesday, Yemenia's chairman Abdul-Khalek Al-Qadhi again denied the plane was unsafe, saying the faults found by France were "cosmetic".
Yemeni investigators are in Moroni to work with Comoran investigators on establishing the crash causes. Yemenia has blamed strong winds, which forced the pilot to abort his first attempt at landing at M
