Amidst the tragedy of Tuesday's Yemenia Airline crash, there is one bright spot: A 13-year-old girl who'd been on board the flight was discovered alive with only minor injuries.
On Tuesday, a Yemenia airplane traveling from Paris to Comoros, a former French colony in Africa, crashed into the Indian Ocean. 153 people were on board the jetliner, and, though officials have been searching the wreckage since the plane went down, the prognosis looks grim for most of the passengers on the ill-fated flight.
But, amidst the tragedy, there is one bright spot: A 13-year-old Franco-Comoran girl from Paris, Bahia Bakari, was discovered in the cold water, where she had been staying afloat by clinging to a piece of shrapnel from the plane for over 13 hours.
When they spotted her, rescuers threw her a buoy to grab onto, but she was unable to get a grip on it. Instead, a Cormorian police officer, Saïd Abdilai, jumped in the water to drag the traumatized child onto the rescue boat, where she was wrapped in blankets and given a cup of hot, sugary water.
“She was a little knocked off. She couldn’t remember her name at first,” Ibrahim Abdurazak, a spokesperson from Comoros’ Prince Said Ibrahim International Airport told the Globe and Mail.
It didn’t take long for the rescuers’ care to revive Bakari, however. Soon, she was able to speak clearly about the tragic incident and provide a report to the police officers. She had been ejected from the plane as it went down, and, though she had broken her collarbone and gotten several scratches, she was in excellent physical condition otherwise.
“I asked her what happened and she said, ‘We saw the plane fall into the water. I found myself in the water. I was hearing people talking but I couldn’t see anyone. I was in the dark. I couldn’t see anything. Daddy, I couldn’t swim very well. I grabbed on to something but I don’t know what,’” the teen survivor’s father, Kassim Bakari, told France’s RTL Radio. “She’s a very timid girl, I never thought she would escape like that.”
While officials are still searching for other possible survivors, and are attempting to learn more about why the plane crashed in hopes of reforming safety policies on Yemeni flights, the people of France and Comoros alike are uplifted by Bakari’s remarkable story.
As Alain Joyandet, France’s Minister for International Cooperation, told RTL Radio, Bakari’s survival is “a true miracle. She is a courageous young girl.”
Watch a video clip about the story from The Guardian.