Only crash survivor of 151153 asking for her mom
MORONI, Comoros - The lone survivor of a Yemeni jetliner crash, who clung to wreckage for 13 hours before being rescued, lay in a hospital bed with a broken collarbone yesterday, asking for little - except for a chance to see her mother.
But relatives said that Bahia Bakari, 14, was too traumatized to be told that her mother was feared dead, along with 151 others on board the Yemenia airways flight.
"I have told her that her mother is in the next room," the girl's uncle, Joseph Yousouf, said outside a hospital in this former French colony, where the jetliner was attempting to land in fierce winds before dawn Tuesday when it slammed into the Indian Ocean.
The girl's father, Kassim Bakari, described his daughter as "fragile" and said that she could "barely swim," but still managed to hang on for hours.
Her account seemed to indicate others survived the impact.
"I spoke to her this afternoon . . . and I asked her what happened," Bakari said from his home near Paris. "She said 'Papa, we saw the plane going down in the water. I was in the water, I could hear people talking, but I couldn't see anyone. I was in the dark, I couldn't see a thing.' " *
