I saw dark shapes below and thought: this is the end

by:Matthew Campbell

SHE clung to a piece of metal, gasping for breath in the waves. Somewhere in the darkness she heard cries for help, but the voices soon faded. Hours later, when the sun came up, Bahia Bakari, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, was adrift alone in the Indian Ocean.

In the middle of her makeshift raft, a piece of aircraft fuselage, she noticed a porthole and peered through it into the inky depths. The sight of dark shapes moving below filled her with terror.

“I couldn’t bear it any longer,” she said. “I couldn’t move any more. It was the end. I closed my eyes.”

The “miracle girl” was the sole survivor of a plane crash in which 152 people, including her mother, were killed on June 30. For the first time she has given a detailed account of her ordeal, describing in a book how she drifted for 13 hours before being saved from shark-infested waters off the Comoros islands, near Madagascar.

Her ghosted memoir, to be published next month, describes her surprise on discovering she had been in a plane crash: until arriving in hospital she was convinced, in her state of shock, that she had fallen from the aircraft after pressing too hard with her forehead against one of its windows.

As she rose and fell in the waves, she believed that Aziza, her mother, had landed safely and would be “worried to death” about her — as well as angry with her for falling out of the plane and not putting on her seatbelt as instructed.

The two had set out from Paris the day before. After a stop in Marseilles they had changed to an Airbus A310 in Yemen for the onward Yemenia flight to Moroni, capital of the Comoros. The cause of the crash has yet to be determined, but the doomed plane had been banned from operating in France.

“It smelt of the loo,” Bahia writes. “There were flies.”

As they were descending into Moroni, the plane began to tremble and the hostesses seemed “nervous”. The cabin lights went on and off and the aircraft began to buck about in the air.

Bahia pressed her forehead against the porthole to see if she could see the lights of Moroni. Then what felt like a surge of electricity convulsed her body.

“I wanted to call Mummy but my body felt stretched to the maximum, about to explode,” she writes. “Then there was a great noise, enormous, unbearable, like a gigantic explosion.”

The next thing she knew she was in the water, coughing, choking, gasping for breath.

“It was dark, a night with no moon, but I saw four pieces of white debris floating not far from me,” she writes in A Day Like Any Other, to be published by Jean-Claude Gawsewitch in Paris. “I managed to swim towards the biggest one.”

She tried to climb onto it, but the metal tipped over when she pressed down on one side. She contented herself with lying across it, her legs dangling in the water.

She heard women crying out for help and tried to move towards them so as not to be alone but her arms hurt when she paddled and, in any case, she could see nothing. The voices stopped after a while.

When she heard the sound of an aircraft passing overhead she was convinced that rescuers would come. On the crest of one wave, she got a glimpse of green hills on the horizon. She tried to paddle but did not have the strength.

After a while it became clear that she was drifting away from land instead of towards it. She began to despair of anyone ever finding her in “this immensity”.

Her strength began to fade and her thoughts became confused. She felt on the verge of giving up. Then she looked up. Struggling through the waves in her direction was a boat. She tried to shout.

Word of the crash had spread fast and dozens of boats had taken to the sea in a hunt for survivors. Libouna Matrafi, a fisherman, stood at the bow of a small boat, staring in amazement at the girl hanging onto a piece of aircraft fuselage.

In the swell it was difficult to reach her and the rescue effort could have ended in tragedy, had it not been for Matrafi’s bravery.

Bahia had let go of her raft. She was trying to swim towards her rescuers when she was swamped by a wave and disappeared underwater.

Matrafi jumped into the sea and swam towards the girl. He pushed her up into the arms of his companions before being swept off by the waves. He was more than 100 yards away by the time the boat turned back to fetch him.

Safely aboard, Bahia was given water and wrapped in blankets. It took several hours in increasingly turbulent seas to get back to port. One of the crew, not wanting Bahia to be anxious, told her that her mother had already been picked up by another boat.

In hospital Bahia discovered that besides the cuts, bruises and burns on her legs, she had a fractured pelvis and collarbone. She expected at any moment to see her mother.

A female psychologist came to see her. It would be normal, she said, for Bahia to feel guilty for having survived the crash. Not understanding the reference to a crash, Bahia asked again after her mother. “You know,” replied the psychologist, “I don’t think they’ve found your mother. They found only you.”

The truth began to dawn on Bahia. “Those words hurt me more than the crash, more than the terrible wait in the cold night alone in the middle of the ocean,” she writes.

“I was amazed by … the almost casual tone in which she announced that I would never again see my mother.”

She went on: “I began to understand the atrocious reality: I was not the only one to fall from the plane. All of the passengers, the pilot, the crew had fallen from the plane. Mummy, she fell from the plane, too, like me, perhaps right next to me.”

For a while she hoped her mother would also be found safe in the sea. By now, though, rescue efforts had all but ceased because of severe weather.

The French minister for overseas territories arranged to take Bahia back to Paris on his plane. She needed to undergo tests in France in case she was suffering from internal injuries. Despite her unease at flying so soon after the disaster, she agreed, eager to see her father.

She spent three weeks in hospital. One of the first visitors was Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, who posed at her bedside for a photographer.

She is happy to have been reunited with her siblings but is being counselled by psychologists in case she suffers post-traumatic stress. Her mother’s body was one of 84 eventually recovered from the sea.

She is looking forward to meeting Matrafi, the man who saved her, who is applying for French residency after being decorated for bravery.

He recently sent her a taped message. “Hello, Bahia. I just wanted to say hello and to ask about your health and that of your sister and brothers,” he said. “Thank God you are alive.”

The only time she had seen his face was when he fixed her with his gaze as he approached through the waves with a life buoy in his hand.

“I try, at night, to remember his face,” she says, “so as never to forget it. He is a hero.”

Related Posts

• Top 10 Defining Moments of the 2000s [/caption] Having reached the end of the first decade of the new millennium, it’s time to look back at all...
• Kids Say the Darndest Things v2 [/caption] From the Humor Files: Kids Say the Darndest Thing A kindergarten student told his teacher he'd found a cat,...
• 500 More Useless Facts [/caption] Most American car horns honk in the key of F. The name Wendy was made up for the book...

Related Websites

• Metal Instruments 101 pt 2 ... Flexatone continued. It is fixed at the wide end to a metal frame that is approximately 30 cm or...
• Overcoming adversity Recently I had the privilege to hear renowned pianist Brooks Aehron. If you ever get a chance to see him,...
• Get into Bed with Hellen Hollick (Author Interview #2) Hello Keira – thanks for welcoming me to your Blog! Keira: How has Gwenhwyfar and Arthur's love evolved from what...