The nine-year-old Dutch boy who was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Libyan capital prepared to fly home yesterday, three days after the disaster that killed his parents, brother and 100 others.
Dutch foreign ministry spokesman Christoph Prommersberger said on Friday that the boy, Ruben van Assouw, would be accompanied on the flight home “by his uncle and aunt and the doctor treating him.”
They are set to leave Tripoli at 10am for a destination in the Netherlands that the ministry refused to disclose.
The aircraft is expected to depart from Matiga military airport in the capital. The Dutch federation of tour operators said its destination would be Eindhoven military airport.
The boy’s aunt and uncle said that Ruben has now been told that his mother, father and 11-year-old brother died in Wednesday’s crash at Tripoli airport that killed a total of 103 people and whose cause remains unknown.
“We have explained to Ruben exactly what happened,” they said in a statement read to media in Tripoli.
“He knows that his parents and his brother are dead,” his relatives said.
It said Ruben was doing well under the circumstances and had seen the flowers and messages of support sent to him.
“The time ahead will be a difficult period for us,” the statement said. “We hope that the media will respect our privacy.”
Earlier Ruben told a Dutch newspaper he could remember nothing of the crash.
“My name is Ruben and I am from Holland,” Telegraaf newspaper reported on a telephone conversation with the only survivor of the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330 that disintegrated on landing at Tripoli airport.
“I am fine, but my legs hurt a lot,” the boy told a reporter from the newspaper on the mobile phone of one of his doctors.
“I am in a hospital,” Ruben said. “I don’t know how I got here, I don’t know anything more. I really want to go home.”
The Dutch newspaper Brabants Dagblad said Ruben was probably from Tilburg in the southern Netherlands and that he had been on safari in South Africa with his mother, Trudy, 41, father, Patrick, 40, and brother Enzo.
The boy’s grandmother, An van de Sande, said in a report on Thursday that the holiday had been to celebrate the couple’s “copper” wedding anniversary.
A Libyan official said on yesterrday that a security agent died of shock on the day of the disaster when he saw the bodies at the crash site on Wednesday.
“He was a diabetic. He ran towards the scene but at the sight of the bodies his blood sugar levels soared and he died on the spot,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
He said the man, who had worked at Tripoli airport, was “elderly.”
Crash investigators have said no technical problems were reported by the pilot before the jet went down.
“The pilot did not report any problems. Until the very last moment things were normal between the pilot and the control tower,” Neji Dhaou, the head of the Libyan commission of inquiry, said on Friday.
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