An Airbus A310-300 from Yemen with 153 people on board, including 66 French nationals, crashed into the sea as it approached the Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros in bad weather early yesterday, officials said.
Some bodies were recovered from the wreck of the Yemenia plane, said Abdul-Rahman Abdul-Qader, undersecretary of Yemen’s aviation authority. He also said a five-year-old child had been rescued from the sea.
The Paris airports authority said 66 French nationals were aboard the plane, which was flying the final leg of a flight taking passengers from Paris and Marseille to Comoros via Yemen. A large number of Comoros nationals were also on board.
Two French military planes and a French ship left the Indian Ocean islands of Mayotte and Reunion to search for the plane.
“The planes have seen debris at the supposed point of impact,” Ibrahim Kassim, an official at the regional air security body ASECNA, told reporters.
It is the second Airbus to plunge into the sea last month, following an Air France Airbus A330-200 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 228 people on board on June 1. A preliminary report on that crash is due tomorrow.
The Paris-Marseille-Yemen leg of the Yemenia flight was flown by an Airbus A330. In Sanaa, those passengers who were flying on to the Comoros changed onto a second Yemenia plane, the A310 that crashed.
French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said faults had been detected during inspections in France in 2007 on the Yemenia A310, and that it had not flown to France since.
“The A310 in question was inspected in 2007 by the DGAC [French transport authorities] and they noticed a certain number of faults,” he told the I-tele TV channel. “The company was not on the black list but was subject to stricter checks on our part, and was due to be interviewed shortly by the European Union’s safety committee.”
French TV showed pictures of friends and relatives of the passengers weeping at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, many of them railing at the airline.
Airbus said it was dispatching a team of investigators to the Comoros. It said the aircraft was built in 1990 and had been used by Yemenia since 1999. Its engines were built by Pratt and Whitney, a unit of United Technologies.
“We still do not have information about the reason behind the crash, or survivors,” Mohammad al-Sumairi, deputy general manager for Yemenia operations, told reporters.
A Yemenia official said there were 142 passengers, including three infants, and 11 crew. The plane was flying to Moroni, capital of Grande Comore, the main island of the archipelago.
“The weather conditions were rough; strong wind and high seas. The wind speed recorded on land at the airport was 61kph. There could be other factors,” Sumairi said.
“We think the crash is somewhere along its landing approach,” Kassim said. “The weather is really not very favorable. The sea is very rough.”
ASECNA — the Agency for Aviation Security and Navigation in Africa and Madagascar — covers Francophone Africa.
The French military said it had sent military and civilian medical teams, boats and divers to the crash site aboard the plane from Reunion. Comoros authorities sent small speedboats to the area.
France and the Comoros have enjoyed close ties since the islands’ independence in 1975. France estimates 200,000 people from Comoros live in mainland France, and remittances from France are an important part of the islands’ economy.
A UN official at Moroni airport, who declined to be named, said the control tower had received notification the plane was coming in to land, and then lost contact with it.
Yemenia is 51 percent owned by Yemen and 49 percent by Saudi Arabia. Its fleet includes two Airbus 330-200s, four Airbus 310-300s and four Boeing 737-800s, according to its Web site.
The Comoros comprises three small volcanic islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan and Moheli, in the Mozambique channel, 300km northwest of Madagascar and a similar distance east of the African mainland.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
IN PURSUIT: Israel’s defense minister said the revenge attacks by Israeli settlers would make it difficult for security forces to find those responsible for the 14-year-old’s death Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday condemned the “heinous murder” of an Israeli teenager in the occupied West Bank as attacks on Palestinian villages intensified following news of his death. After Benjamin Achimeir, 14, was reported missing near Ramallah on Friday, hundreds of Jewish settlers backed by Israeli forces raided nearby Palestinian villages, torching vehicles and homes, leaving at least one villager dead and dozens wounded. The attacks escalated in several villages on Saturday after Achimeir’s body was found near the Malachi Hashalom outpost. Agence France-Presse correspondents saw smoke rising from burned houses and fields. Mayor Amin Abu Alyah, of the