Cyrille, a merchant marine from Madagascar, had been heading with a team of rescuers toward a distress signal after the plane crashed Tuesday in the Indian Ocean off the coast of this former French colony.

Bahia Bakari, 12, was the only survivor. The other 152 people on board - including Bahia's mother - are presumed dead.

In a handwritten report, obtained yesterday by the Associated Press, Cyrille wrote that the crew saw a girl "trying to get onto a piece of wood or plastic." A member of the rescue team threw a life preserver to the girl, but the waters were too rough for her to catch it.

One of the sailors, Libouna Maturaffe Soulemane - who had completed a rescue course six months earlier - jumped into the sea with a flotation device and reached out to Bahia.

"When I saw the girl, I was not afraid to dive in," Soulemane told the Associated Press. "She was calm. . . . She knew what she was doing. The girl is very courageous."

The crew aboard Sima Com 2 threw the life buoy again toward Soulemane and the girl and pulled them to the boat.

Cyrille's report said that Bahia survived at sea for more than nine hours, while French officials have estimated the time at 13 hours.

Once she was on board, Maj. Said Ali Madi, a police officer at the port of Moroni who was on board Sima Com 2, asked Bahia to remove her clothes so they could give her something dry to wear, Soulemane said.

But the shy girl refused.

Madi then began cutting away bits of her clothing as crew members wrapped her with two beige bed covers and a curtain.

Cyrille sailed the Sima Com 2 back to Port Moroni, where they handed over Bahia to medical authorities.

Apart from hypothermia, she suffered a fractured collarbone and bruises to her face, elbow, and foot.

Bahia returned to France aboard a French government plane Thursday and is hospitalized in Paris.

The Sima Com 2 is a privately owned ship that normally transports passengers between Comoros and the island of Madagascar. When the Yemenia flight disappeared, the Comoros government ordered ships at Moroni port to search for the plane because the government does not have any ships of its own.

Ships and military planes continue to search for survivors, bodies, and wreckage from Yemenia Flight 626.

Yesterday, a Yemeni aviation committee overseeing the investigation said that divers had recovered pieces of the fuselage of the Airbus 310 and that Yemeni, French, and Comoran officials listened to the communication between the control tower and the flight before it went down, but it gave no details.

After days of protests by Comorans in France against the airline, Yemenia ordered its flights to Comoros suspended. Protesters say the aircraft are unsafe.

In France yesterday, at least 10,000 people held a silent homage in Marseille for the 152 victims. Marching behind a black banner, many of the protesters alleged that dangerous planes - or "flying garbage cans" - are used by the airline.

Sixty-one of the people who died in Tuesday's crash of the flight from Paris to Moroni were from Marseille, many of them Comorans.

Many in France's Comoran community are angry that it took the accident to focus attention on what they claim are dangerous conditions on the flight path to the Indian Ocean island-nation, unsafe planes, unhelpful crews, and stopovers in Yemen's capital San'a that can last hours or days in stifling heat.

At a news conference yesterday in Moroni, Yemen's transport minister, Nabil al-Fakeh, said that the crash was the airline's first accident and that people should wait for the investigation results before drawing conclusions.

"It is not fair to say that Yemenia is not taking care of safety," Fakeh said.