A shy Paris schoolgirl described yesterday how she clung to a piece of wreckage in the Indian Ocean for more than 13 hours before being rescued. She was the only one to survive among 153 people on board the Yemenia Airlines flight that crashed into the sea off the Comoros Islands early on Tuesday.

Bahia Bakari, 13, told her father how she had been thrown clear when the A310 Airbus hit the water as it was approaching Moroni airport. Aziza Aboudou, her mother, who was travelling with her to visit family in the Comoros, was among the dead.

“I asked her what happened,” said Kassim Bakari, speaking at the family home at Corbeil, in the Paris suburbs. “She said: ‘We saw the plane fall in the water. I found myself in the water. I was hearing people speak but I couldn’t see anyone. 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’.”

Mr Bakari, who has three other daughters, said that he had given up hope of seeing his partner or eldest daughter again. When news reports of a child survivor emerged, he prayed that it was Bahia. “She is a very, very shy girl. I would never have thought she would have survived like this. It is God’s will,” he said.

“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 traumatise her. But it’s not true. I don’t know who is going to tell her.”

Rescue workers praised Bahia for managing to stay afloat in rough seas among bodies and wreckage nine miles off the coast of Grande Comore island. Most passengers appeared to have gone down with the aircraft.

Sergeant Said Abdilai, one of the rescuers, said: “We tried to throw a lifebelt. She could not grab it. I had to jump in the water to get her.” He gave the girl warm water with sugar, he said. “She was shaking. We put four covers on her.”

Bahia, whose family was originally from a Comoros village, suffered cuts to her face, a fractured collarbone and burns to her knees.

The head of the disaster unit in the Comoros said that the teenager survived against “astonishing” odds. “It is truly, truly, miraculous,” said Ibrahim Abdoulazeb. “The young girl can barely swim.”

Alain Joyandet, the French Minister for Co-operation, visited Bahia in hospital. “It is a true miracle. She is a courageous young girl,” he said. “She held on to a piece of the plane from 1.30am to 3pm.”

Claire Ali, Bahia’s aunt, said: “She showed an absolutely incredible physical and moral strength.” She told The Times in Paris that the family still believed that Bahia’s mother was alive. “We are happy that the little girl has been saved. But this is all too painful to talk about,” she said. Bahia, who was starting out on her summer school holidays, arrives back in Paris this morning and will be admitted to hospital. “She is physically out of danger. She is very traumatised,” said the French minister.

Anger is growing in France’s 200,000-strong Comoran community towards the airline, which serves the former French archipelago. Pilot error is suspected as the cause of the crash two minutes after the crew aborted their initial approach and circled low to make a second landing attempt in heavy winds. Bahia’s father added his voice to claims of “shoddy” practices at the airline. France should not allow flights from Paris that switch to “substandard” aircraft as soon they reach Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, he said. “How can they allow such flying coffins? No one ever lifted a finger to deal with the problem. Now there is anger and hatred.”

Yemenia Airlines, which is owned jointly by Yemeni and Saudi Arabian interests, denied official French claims that the A310 Airbus was not airworthy.

In Marseilles, home to more Comorans than live in the Indian Ocean state’s capital, there were claims that the crash had been “a tragedy waiting to happen”. Moegni Toahiry, 39, who waited outside the Comoran consulate for news of his three children who were on the flight, said: “We had been sounding the alarm bells.”

It took several hours for the first boats to reach the scene of the crash owing to heavy seas. French and US military and naval vessels and divers combed the site yesterday, collecting bodies that were being carried away on a fast current.

Signals from the aircraft’s distress beacons were located last night several hundred feet below the surface, raising hopes that the wreckage will be found and the flight recorders recovered.

French accident investigators are to issue a first report today into Air France flight 447, which went down over the Atlantic off Brazil on June 1, killing all 228 aboard. The report is expected to confirm that the A340 Airbus was brought down by a combination of stormy weather, faulty systems and possibly misjudgment by the crew.

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