Bahia Bakari was twelve years old when she left Roissy airport on June 29, 2009 with her mother for a vacation in the Comoros. After a stopover in Marseille, they changed planes in Sanaa, Yemen.
During the night, approaching the airport of Moroni, capital of the Comoros, the A310 which was carrying 142 passengers and eleven crew members hit the water and crashed into the Indian Ocean.
The young woman is the only survivor of the disaster: she survived by clinging to a piece of the plane for ten hours, before being rescued by sailors the next day.
Now 25, Bahia Bakari has attended several hearings with her father since the start of the trial on May 9, without speaking to the press. Both victim and only witness to the accident, she must testify from 10:00 a.m.
“That night of June 30, 2009, a miracle happened. Death brushed against me, it took my mother but she didn’t want me,” she wrote in a book published in 2010, “Me Bahia, the miraculous”.
– “Gigantic explosion” –
She explained that she remembered that the plane, “more dilapidated” than the first, had begun to “rock more and more” and that she then felt a “huge discharge of electric current” and “a gigantic explosion “.
In “icy water”, in the middle of “black waves”, she described having heard “women screaming” for a time and then falling into “a kind of coma” while remaining hung “by a miracle” on a piece of scrap metal. .
Bahia Bakari, born in Essonne to Comorian parents on August 15, 1996, suffered from broken legs and burns.
Repatriated to France, she had received a visit from the President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy.
French justice had immediately opened an investigation because of the presence among the victims of 66 French people – the trial is being held in Paris for the same reasons.
Experts concluded that the accident was due to a series of pilot errors, ruling out the hypothesis of a missile, a technical failure of the plane and lightning.
Yemenia Airways, which operated flight IY626, is suspected of “shortcomings” in connection with the accident: it is accused of having maintained night flights for Moroni despite the failure of lights signaling obstacles near the airport and of having insufficiently trained its pilots.
– Pilot training –
Since the opening of the trial, the defendants’ bench has been empty: no representative of the company is present because of the war raging in Yemen, according to the defense.
Aeronautical experts took turns at the helm, detailing the “incoherent maneuvers” of the pilots before the crash from the flight recorders contained in the black boxes.
The training of the crew was particularly discussed, in particular on the basis of new expert consultations produced by the defense.
Members of the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie (IRCGN) described the violence of the accident on the bodies and explained the difficulty of identifying the remains, of which only a part was found on the coasts and at the bottom of the ‘ocean.
Monday’s hearing must be broadcast in Marseille, where many passengers had boarded.
The Yemenia crash took place a month after the Rio-Paris accident, which killed 228 people – the trial of Airbus and Air France is to be held in the fall in the same court.
The trial is due to end on June 2.
