Paris/Johannesburg - The search for victims of Tuesday's Yemen Airways (Yemenia) crash off the Comoros islands continued for a second day Wednesday as the only known survivor prepared to return home, amid contradictory accounts about 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 with 153 people on board.
The crash occurred on the last stage of a flight from Paris to the Comoran capital of Moroni.
Bakary was preparing to return to France Wednesday with French Junior Minister for Development Alain Joyandet after suffering relatively minor injuries in the crash.
The teenager, who is of Comoran origin, was found in the water clinging to wreckage in a state of extreme exhaustion Tuesday. But a doctor treating her at a hospital in the Comoran capital Moroni said she was recovering well.
"She seems very calm, compared to the shock she has suffered. She has a fracture of the collarbone that we are treating but nothing very serious," a doctor at El-Marouf hospital was quoted as saying by al-Watan, a local newspaper.
The girl's father, Bakari Kassim, told France 24 television that his daughter had told him by telephone that after the crash she could hear other survivors around her talking in the water.
"After a while I didn't hear any talking any more. I just hung on," she said.
The search for bodies and wreckage of the plane continued Wednesday after being called off overnight because of bad weather. Not a single victim has yet been recovered from the waters, although several had been spotted.
Contradictory statements by French ministers and Cormoran authorities created confusion about whether or not one of the plane's two black boxes had been located.
Joyandet had earlier said that 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.
But late Wednesday Christophe Pruzack, a spokesman for the French military, said the black box had in effect vanished.
"Yesterday (Tuesday) we detected a signal but there were no ships (in the area)," he said. "Today, ships are there, but we are no longer receiving the signal."
Meanwhile, Yemen's national airline,Yemenia, defended itself against charges that the Airbus A310 was unsafe.
"The plane was 100 per cent technically healthy," the company's chairman Abdul-Khalek al-Qadhi told a press conference in Sana'a, where the passengers boarded the ill-fated final leg of the flight from Paris to the Comoran capital Moroni.
He said the inspections that the plane underwent two years ago in Marseilles, France, did not detect technical faults but only "cosmetic" flaws.
In 2007, the plane was banned from landing on French soil by the French Civil Aviation Authority (DGAC) because an inspection had detected a number of irregularities.
"There were many findings and they were cosmetic findings," al-Qadhi said. "These cosmetic findings were solved and fixed in 2007, and since then it was flying continuously."
Meanwhile, a group of angry Comorans temporarily blocked the takeoff of a Yemenia aircraft from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
The demonstrators charged that the airline used unsafe planes to Comoros. On arriving in Sana'a from France on an Airbus A330, the passengers on Tuesday's flight had been switched to the 19-year-old A310.
Authorities at Charles de Gaulle Airport moved Wednesday's takeoff to another terminal, where the plane took off with about 100 passengers on its flight to Marseille and the Yemeni capital Sana'a.
Yemenia said Wednesday it would pay each affected family 20,000 euros in advance compensation and lay on a special flight to take the families of the victims from France to Comoros after all the bodies had been retrieved.
