MORONI, Comoros—The only known survivor of a Yemeni jetliner crash—a 12-year-old girl who doesn’t know how to swim—clung to wreckage in the Indian Ocean for 13 hours before she was rescued by a passing boat.

“It’s a true miracle. She’s a courageous young girl,” Alain Joyandet, France’s minister for international cooperation, said of Bahia Bakiri on Wednesday as she lay curled in a fetal position, covered by a blue blanket, at El Maaruf Hospital in the Comoros capital Moroni.

“When I spoke to her she was asking for her mother. They told her she was in a room next door, so as not to traumatize her. But it’s not true. I don’t know who is going to tell her.” Joyandet gave the girl’s age as 12. Officials have variously said she was 14 or 13, but the minister’s spokesperson said she would turn 13 on Aug. 15.

He scotched rumors that a second child had been found alive, reported by doctors who said their hospital had been put on alert.

The girl asked for her mother, but relatives said she was too traumatized to be told that her mother was feared dead, along with 151 others on board Yemenia Airways Flight 626 that crashed before dawn on Tuesday.

“I have told her that her mother is in the next room,” Bahia’s uncle, Joseph Yousouf, said outside the hospital in this former French colony, where the jetliner attempted to land in fierce winds before it slammed into the Indian Ocean.

Bahia suffered a broken collarbone and bruises on her face, but doctors said her injuries were not life-threatening.

The girl’s father, Kassim Bakari, described his daughter as “fragile” and said she could “barely swim,” but still managed to hang on for hours.

‘We saw plane going down’

Bahia’s account of the crash seemed to indicate others survived the initial impact.

“I spoke to her this afternoon ... and I asked her what happened,” Bakari told RTL radio from his home in a suburb south of Paris after speaking to his daughter by phone.

“She said ‘Papa, we saw the plane going down in the water. I was in the water, I could hear people talking, but I couldn’t see anyone. I was in the dark, I couldn’t see a thing,’’’ he said.

“She said that, at a point in time, instructions were given to passengers to strap themselves in,” Joyandet added, also on RTL radio.

“She said that afterward, she felt something like electricity—that was the term she used. And then, very quickly, she found herself in the water hanging on to a piece of the aircraft with which she struggled to stay alive for more than 10 or so hours.”

When rescuers emerged in the clear light of day, Bahia had been rendered too weak by hypothermia.

“We tried to throw a life buoy. She could not grab it. I had to jump in the water to get her,” one rescuer told France’s Europe 1 radio, saying that she was spotted bobbing in the middle of bodies and debris.

“She was shaking, shaking. We put four covers on her. We gave her hot, sugary water. We simply asked her name, village.”

Nothing short of miraculous

Officials said Bahia’s survival was nothing short of miraculous.

The head of the government crisis cell in Comoros said the youngster survived astonishing odds. “It is truly, truly, miraculous,” Ibrahim Abdoulazeb said. “The young girl can barely swim.”

A chartered executive jet carrying French officials flew Bahia to Paris late Wednesday to the waiting arms of her father and siblings. An emergency ambulance then took Bahia to Armand-Trousseau Children’s Hospital in the east of the French capital.

Bahia, the eldest of four children, boarded the plane, an aging Airbus 310, 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.

“It’s an enormous message that she sends to the world ... almost nothing is impossible,” Joyandet said.

“She makes this tragedy different. Obviously we are thinking of all those families who are in mourning, there are 150 people who are currently missing. The Comoros and France are arm in arm to find out everything that happened.”

Search for black boxes

French and American recovery crews are still searching for the plane’s black boxes in deep waters off the Comoros. Officials hope the flight data and cockpit voice recorders will provide clues to the cause of the crash.

It was not immediately clear which section of the passenger cabin Bahia had been sitting in. But if the plane flew into the water at speed, the impact damage to the fuselage would have been so violent and extensive that no part of the cabin would have been safer than any other, experts said.

Hassan al-Hawthi, the head of maintenance at Yemenia, told reporters that air traffic controllers had instructed the pilot to change course because of the strong wind. He said there was no distress call before the crash.

The 2,913-meter long runway at Prince Said Ibrahim International Airport on Moroni island is adequate for modern airliners, but is considered a difficult one due to weather conditions and the surrounding hills. Some airlines provide special training to pilots who need to fly in there.

Payments to victims

Yemenia chair Abdul Khaleq al-Qadi told reporters in the Yemeni capital San’a that the the airline would make an initial payment of 20,000 euros ($28,000) to the families of each victim.

The announcement came amid mounting anger over the condition of the 19-year-old Yemenia jet, which had been banned from France’s airspace because of doubts about its safety. Airbus has stopped manufacturing the long-haul plane since 2007.

Comoros Vice President Idi Nadhoim criticized France over the crash, saying Paris should have alerted them that the twin-engine aircraft was unsafe.

“It could have been easier for us if France had communicated to us the list of Airbus planes not good to fly, which is not the case,” Nadhoim told France 24 television.

Brusque response

That drew a brusque response from French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

“The plane was banned from flying to our country, everybody knew it,” Kouchner said during a visit to Senegal. “Everybody knew it in the Comoros, everybody.”

The flight left Paris on Monday for Marseille and San’a aboard a modern Airbus A330 before passengers switched to the older Airbus jet to continue to Djibouti and Moroni.