Lone survivor of 2009 plane crash testifies in Paris court

PARIS (AP) — The lone survivor of a 2009 plane crash in the Indian Ocean took the stand Monday in a Paris courtroom, recounting her ordeal as a 12-year-old girl hearing screams, clinging to floating debris and desperately hoping that her mother was still alive.

Bahia Bakari's mother was among 152 people who died on the flight operated by Yemen Airways, which is now known as Yemenia.

Composed throughout her testimony, Bakari cried as she mourned her mother's loss. Others in the courtroom broke down crying too.

Bakari, dressed all in white and praised for her bravery by judges and lawyers, delivered powerful testimony in a room heavy with emotion.

“We were landing, I started to feel some turbulence but people didn’t seem worried about it. Then I felt an electrical shock and I woke up in the water. I don’t remember what happened between sitting in the plane and being in the water. I have a black hole,” Bakari said.

Yemen’s national carrier is charged with manslaughter and unintentional injuries over the crash, which occurred at 11:53 p.m., causing the deaths of 141 passengers and 11 crew members. Sixty-five of the dead were French citizens.

Now 25, Bakari was 12 when she took the plane with her mother to go to Comoros off Africa's eastern coast to attend a wedding. The plane departed from Paris, made a stopover in the southern French city of Marseille and then landed in Sanaa. Bakari described switching to a smaller plane to go from the Yemeni capital to Moroni in the Comoros. It was a night flight and Bakari remembered that “everyone was exhausted.”

After the plane plunged into the ocean, she grasped a floating part of the destroyed plane and stayed in the water for 11 hours before being saved by fishermen.

Bakari remembered hearing “female voices which screamed for...