http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/06/200963094817312298.html
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
14:27 Mecca time, 11:27 GMT
News Africa
Child survives Yemeni plane crash
The Yemenia airlines A310 was carrying 153 people when
it crashed in the seas off the Comoros [AFP]
A five-year-old boy has survived after a Yemeni airliner with 153
people on board crashed in the Indian Ocean.
The child was plucked alive from the ocean after the Airbus
A310-300 went down in stormy weather as it tried to land in the Comoros
capital, Moroni, in the early hours on Tuesday.
"A doctor from the military hospital aboard one of the rescue boats
called the Mitsamiouli hospital to tell them a child had been rescued alive,"
Halidi Ahmed Abdou, a doctor at a medical centre opened for survivors, told
Reuters.
Some bodies have been found and there are no reports of other
survivors, said officials from the air carrier, Yemenia, on Tuesday.
The airport's control tower lost contact with the plane shortly
after receiving notification that it was coming in to land.
Three infants and 11 crew were among those on board.
'Weather unfavourable'
The plane, carrying mostly French and Comoran nationals, was flying
from the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, to Moroni on the main Comoros island of Grande
Comore.
Recent air crashes
1 June: Air France Airbus plane travelling from Rio de
Janeiro to Paris disappears in the Atlantic with 228 people on board
20 May: Indonesian army C-130 Hercules transport plane
crashes into a village on eastern Java, killing at least 97 people
12 February: Plane crashes into a house in Buffalo, New
York, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground
Most passengers had travelled to Sanaa from Paris or Marseille on
another aircraft.
Search and rescue planes had spotted debris at the crash site, said
Ibrahim Kassim, an official with the Agency for Aviation Security and
Navigation in Africa and Madagascar (Ascena), which covers Francophone Africa.
He said the plane had probably come down between five and 10km from
the coast and crashed along its landing approach.
"The weather is really not very favourable. The sea is very rough,"
Kassim told the Reuters news agency.
Moroni airport authorities said civilian and military rescue teams
were immediately deployed to search for the plane in the rough waters.
'Other factors'
"Two French military aircraft have left from the islands of Mayotte
and Reunion to search the identified zone, and a French vessel has left
Mayotte," Hadji Madi Ali, the director-general of the airport, said.
Mohammad al-Sumairi, the deputy general manager for Yemenia
operations, told Reuters that they did not know the cause of the crash.
"The weather conditions were rough with strong winds and high seas.
The wind speed recorded on land at the airport was 61km an hour," he said,
adding there could be "other factors".
Comoros officials said the plane could have crashed in the area of
Mitsamiouli, a town on the main island.
The Comoros covers three small volcanic islands, Grande Comore,
Anjouan and Moheli, in the Mozambique channel about 300km northwest of
Madagascar and about the same distance east of the African mainland.
The crash marks the second time an Airbus has plunged into the sea
this month, after an Air France Airbus A330-200 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean
killing 228 people on board on June 1.
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