Bahia Bakari, 14, returned to France on a plane carrying a government minister and other French officials. The Falcon-900 jet with medical facilities aboard left the archipelago nation of the Comoros, a former French colony, and arrived at Le Bourget airport just north of Paris.
Yemenia Flight 626 crashed Tuesday morning off Comoros amid heavy winds, and Bahia, described by her father as a fragile girl who could barely swim, spent over 13 hours in the water clinging to plane wreckage before she was rescued.
The other 152 people on the plane, including her mother, are presumed dead. It is not clear that Bahia knows her mother is dead because her uncle who visited her Wednesday at a Comoros hospital was too heartbroken to break the news. Instead, he told Bahia that her mother was also recovering.
Bahia's father, Kassim, met the plane, saying he was relieved and overjoyed to see his daughter even as he mourned his wife.
"It was very powerful," he said of his reunion with Bahia. He said he asked her,"'How are you? Was the return trip OK?' ... We joked a little, the two of us."
Several other family members joined the airport reunion before an ambulance took the girl to the Armand-Trousseau Children's Hospital in eastern Paris.
"In the midst of the mourning, there is Bahia. It is a miracle, it is an absolutely extraordinary battle for survival," France's government minister for cooperation, Alain Joyandet, said at a news conference at the airport.
Bahia, the eldest of four children, had boarded a plane in Paris with her mother, Aziza, on Monday morning for a long journey via Marseille and San'a, Yemen, to Comoros where they planned to spend part of the summer school holidays with relatives. Her three siblings had stayed behind with her father.
When found hanging on to a piece of the plane, Bahia was suffering from hypothermia, a broken collarbone and bruises to her face, her elbow and her foot.
Joyandet said the girl recounted her ordeal a bit to him.
"She says instructions were given to passengers and that then she felt something like electricity ... as if she had been a bit electrocuted," Joyandet said. "And suddenly there was this big sound. She found herself in the water — and you know the rest."
The minister praised her strength and courage.
"It's an enormous message that she sends to the world ... almost nothing is impossible," said Joyandet, who accompanied the girl back to France. "We will do everything we can to help her."
He noted that 152 other people on the plane are still missing and vowed "the Comoros and France are arm-in-arm to find out everything that happened."
Off the coast of the Comoros islands, French and U.S. ships directed the search for survivors, bodies and plane wreckage Thursday, even as hope in finding anyone alive in the choppy seas faded.
"Up to this moment, there have been no bodies, nor any other survivor," said Jean Youssouf, director-general of El Maarouf Hospital in Moroni. "Do we continue to hope to find survivors? Yes, we will continue to hope."
In the coastal town of Mitsamiouli, about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from Moroni, the capital of Comoros, rescue boats went to sea. Dozens of Red Crescent tents were set up on shore and about 100 French, American, Yemeni and Comoran military personnel gathered to aid the search effort.
Ramoulati Ben Ali, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent Society of Comoros, said because of the "the wind, the rough sea, we have not been able to recover any bodies."
A 16-member U.S. search-and-rescue team arrived in Moroni late Wednesday after being asked to come by the Comoros government, a U.S. diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
He declined to give further details.
The French air accident investigation agency BEA was sending a team of investigators and Airbus experts to Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) south of Yemen, between Africa's southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar.
A respected pilots group, the London-based International Federation of Air Line Pilots Association, said the plane may have been attempting a go-around in rough weather for another approach when it hit the sea.
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