A schoolgirl, aged 12, who barely knows how to swim but who survived a plane crash in the Indian Ocean by clinging to wreckage, has said that when the aircraft plunged into the sea it felt “like being electrocuted”.

Bahia Bakari is the only survivor of the Yemenia Airways flight that crashed with 153 people on board as it was approaching the Comoros Islands. She has told her family in Paris she felt “hot and cold” as she lay for hours on a piece of fuselage being buffeted by waves.

At one point during her ordeal she saw a ship passing on the horizon but it was too far away for anyone on board to notice her. Her legs felt as though they were burning. She clung to the wreckage for more than 13 hours before being spotted by rescuers. By then she was too weak to wave at them. They wrapped her in a blanket and gave her water with sugar.

“I was really thirsty,” Bahia told Houzaimata Bakari, one of her aunts.

She was being treated in a Paris hospital yesterday for a broken collarbone, bruises, cuts and burns as well as exhaustion. According to hospital staff, the life of the “miracle child”, as the French press have called her, was not in danger. But the psychological trauma will almost certainly prove harder to heal than her physical wounds.

Her father Kassim said he had given up hope of seeing his daughter again after news broke of the disaster. When he heard there was one child survivor he prayed that it was Bahia. “It was God’s will that she lived,” he said.

His joy at Bahia’s “miraculous” survival was tempered, however, by grief over the loss of her mother Aziza, with whom he shared a council flat in the Parisian suburb of Corbeil Essonnes. While her three younger siblings stayed at home, Bahia had set off from Paris with her mother on Monday and flown via Marseilles and Yemen for a holiday in the Comoros Islands, a former French colony off east Africa.

Bahia said she heard “a big sound” as the plane crashed in the early hours of Tuesday morning while coming in to land. Pilot error is the suspected cause of the crash, which happened two minutes after the crew aborted an initial approach and circled low over the sea to make a second attempt in heavy winds.

Kassim, 40, had agonised over how to tell his daughter and sons about the loss of their mother. But Bahia, displaying a lucidity beyond her years, seemed to know before being told that Aziza would not be coming home.

“I know that Mummy is not in the room next door like they said, otherwise she would have already come to see me,” she told her aunt over the telephone from the first hospital to which she was taken in the Comoros.

“I understand, you know. Tell Papa I’m thinking about him. Tell him to come to me.”

In the end, Alain Joyandet, a French government minister, escorted Bahia back to Paris on his Falcon jet on Thursday morning, when she was reunited with her father, a dustman.

He went on to the plane to greet her, holding her hand in his as she lay on a bunk being hydrated through a drip. She was taken by ambulance to a children’s hospital.

“She is exhausted and sleeping a lot,” Fatima, another of the girl’s aunts, told The Sunday Times. “It’s very hard for her, knowing that her mother is missing and that she was the only survivor.”

The child is believed to have received cuts and bruises as she was ejected from the plane when it hit the water. Her first comments to her father suggested that other passengers may have survived the crash before succumbing to their injuries or drowning.

“I was hearing people speak but I couldn’t see anyone,” she said. “I was in the dark. I couldn’t see anything. Daddy, I couldn’t swim very well. I grabbed on to something but I don’t know what.”

When the sun came up she realised that she was alone in the middle of a giant fuel slick. She fell asleep, somehow managing to avoid being swept by waves from her floating island of metal. She had no life jacket.

Because of heavy seas, it took several hours for the first boats to reach the crash scene, off the coast of Grande Comore island.

Anger has grown among France’s 200,000-strong Comoran community towards Yemenia Airways amid accusations that the aircraft was not safe. Hundreds of protesters at the airport in Marseilles prompted the airline to suspend its service from France out of respect, it said, for relatives of the victims.

Bahia joins an elite club of child survivors of air crashes: experts say children are often shielded more effectively than adults by their seats.

Joyandet said she represented “an absolutely extraordinary battle for survival”.

Times Recommends

• Zardari still has to tackle tough questions
• Material evidence 'debunks' Turin Shroud
• BBC criticised over Uganda gay execution poll