LE BOURGET, France - A French government plane carrying the young girl believed to be the only survivor of an Indian Ocean plane crash arrived Thursday at a Paris airport from Comoros.
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 8 a.m.
An emergency ambulance drove up to the aircraft, and she was expected to be taken immediately to a hospital.
At the foot of the aircraft was her father, Kassim, as well as several other members of her family.
Bakari, the eldest of four children, had boarded a plane in Paris with her mother, Aziza, on Monday morning for the 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.
Flight IY 626 crashed Tuesday morning in severe turbulence, and Bakari, described as a fragile girl who could barely swim, spent some 13 hours in the water before she was rescued.
The other 151 people on the plane, including Bakari's mother, are presumed dead.
When found hanging on to a piece of the plane, Bakari was suffering from hypothermia, a broken collarbone and bruises.
She was accompanied back to France by Alain Joyandet, the French minister of cooperation.
© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
