Bahia Bakari

Flight history and crash

Bakari and her mother, Aziza Aboudou, were traveling to the Comoros for a summer vacation. Like many of the passengers of Yemenia Flight 626, they began their voyage from Paris, France on a different plane, which made an intermediate stop in Marseille and then landed in Sana'a, Yemen. There the passengers boarded another aircraft, an Airbus A310, for the flight segment to Comoros, with a stop in Djibouti. As it descended for its approach, minutes away from its final destination of Prince Said Ibrahim International Airport, the jet plunged into the ocean 9 miles (14 km) north of the coastline of Grande Comore island, breaking apart as it hit the water, at approx. 01:50 local time (22:50 UTC). Bakari was ejected from the plane as it crashed, and found herself floating alone outside amid debris.

Survival

Bakari reported having no life jacket and only minimal swimming skills, but she managed to hold on to a piece of fuselage wreckage. Most of the time that was to elapse before her rescue was night. She reported later that initially there must have been other survivors as she could hear them after the crash but later the voices became silent. In the morning of the next day Bakari came to realize she was alone at sea having been drifting for hours without food and water. She also reported having seen a ship on the horizon that was, however, too far away to take notice of her.

Rescue

Since the Comoran government has no ships of its own, it asked all commercial and private vessels to help in the search and rescue effort. At approx. 11 local time (08:00 UTC), about 9 hours after the crash, the Sima Com 2 — a privately owned ship which normally carries passengers between Comoros and the neighboring island of Madagascar — arrived at the crash site and discovered Bakari, as the sole survivor among bits of floating wreckage.

As soon as Bakari was sighted, a member of the rescue team threw her a life preserver, but the waters were too rough, and she was too exhausted to grab it. One of the sailors, Maturaffi Sélémane Libounah, jumped into the water and handed her a flotation device, after which they were both pulled safely aboard the Sima Com 2, where she was given dry blankets and a hot drink.

Ibrahim Abdallah, another sailor on the Sima Com 2, recalled Bakari's recovery:

When the girl saw us approaching, she let go of the piece of debris she had been using as a life preserver. Suddenly, a large wave flipped her over and she disappeared from view, until she reappeared a few minutes later. It was at this exact moment that Maturaffi jumped into the water to save her.

The ship arrived in Port Moroni at 19:25 local time (16:25 UTC), where Bakari was handed over to medical authorities and taken to a local hospital.

Aftermath

The next day, Bakari was transported back to Paris on a private French government Falcon-900 jet, escorted by Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet, who called her survival "a true miracle." Upon arrival, she was reunited with her father and other family members, and taken by ambulance to the Armand-Trousseau children's hospital in eastern Paris, where she was admitted and diagnosed with a fractured pelvis and collarbone, burns to her knees, cuts, bruises and exhaustion. One of her first visitors in the hospital was then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who reportedly promised to host her and her family at the Élysée Palace. Soon afterwards, she was informed of her mother's death. She was released three weeks later after undergoing treatment and surgery.

In a commemoration ceremony held in Comoros for the accident victims on July 6, Comoran President Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi declared a month of national mourning in his island nation and honored Maturaffi Sélémane Libounah, the sailor who had rescued Bahia Bakari, telling him: "You saved someone else's life at the risk of losing yours."

According to Aviation Safety Network's database, Bakari is a survivor of the deadliest sole-survivor airliner ocean crash, and the second deadliest sole survivor airplane crash ever after Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987.

Book

In January 2010, Bakari released an account of her ordeal in a French memoir, "Moi Bahia, la miraculée" ("I'm Bahia, the miracle girl"), published by Jean-Claude Gawsewitch Éditeur in Paris, France. In the book, co-authored with French journalist Omar Guendouz as ghostwriter, Bakari provides details about her survival and rescue. She discloses that immediately after the crash, she thought she had fallen out of the airplane by pressing her forehead too hard against the window, and that her mother—who she believed had landed safely without her—would scold her for not wearing her seat belt. Then, floating on debris in the midst of a jet fuel slick released from the aircraft's burst fuel tanks, she recalls having "...this taste of fuel in my mouth, mixed with salt, which burned my throat, my lungs and my stomach." Bakari writes that she only realized her plane had crashed and that she was the sole survivor when she was in the hospital, believing until then that she had simply fallen out into the ocean. AOL News reports that Steven Spielberg approached Bakari to make a film based on her book, but she turned him down, worried that "it would be too terrifying."