A French government plane carrying the young girl believed to be the only survivor of an Indian Ocean plane crash arrived at a Paris airport from Comoros yesterday.
Bahia Bakari, 14, was brought back to France on the plane carrying a government minister and other French officials. The Falcon-900 jet with medical facilities aboard arrived at Le Bourget airport just north of Paris shortly after 8am.
An emergency ambulance drove up to the aircraft and she was expected to be taken to a hospital.
PHOTO: REUTERS
At the foot of the aircraft was her father, Kassim, as well as several other members of her family.
Bakari had boarded a plane in Paris with her mother, Aziza, on Monday morning for the long, to Comoros, where they planned to spend part of the summer holidays with relatives. Her three siblings had stayed behind with her father.
Flight IY 626 crashed on Tuesday morning in severe turbulence.
When found hanging on to a piece of the plane, Bakari was suffering from hypothermia, a broken collarbone and bruises.
Bakari told her father she was thrown clear of the Yemenia Airbus A310 when it crashed.
The girl’s father told French news outlets that he had spoken to his daughter on the telephone yesterday: “I asked her what happened and she said, ‘We saw the plane fall in the water. I found myself in the water. I was hearing people speak 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.’”
Kassim Bakari, who has three other children, said that when he heard about the crash he thought he would never again see his wife and oldest daughter.
He said that his daughter had not yet been told that her mother was dead.
“They told her she was in a room next door, so as not to traumatize her. But it’s not true. I don’t know who is going to tell her,” he said.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
RSS