Comoros: 10 bodies found

2009-07-08 10:46

Johannesburg - The government of the Comoros islands, where 152 people perished last week in a Yemen Airways plane crash, said Wednesday that Tanzanian authorities had alerted it to the discovery of a number of bodies in Tanzanian waters.

"The foreign affairs ministry in Dar es Salaam informed us that they found around 10 bodies," Kamaliddine Afraitane, spokesperson for the Comoran government in Moroni said.

The bodies had been recovered in the Indian Ocean off an island near the semi-autonomous Tanzanian islands of Zanzibar, Afraitane said.

Tanzanian media reported that eight bodies were fished from the water in islets close to Mafia Island, one of three Tanzanian "Spice Islands" south of Zanzibar.

Make arrangements

If identified as victims of the June 31 Airbus A310 crash off Grande Comore island, they would be the first bodies to be found. A nearly-week-long search of the waters surrounding the suspected crash site has so far yielded none.

A Comoran delegation of ministers, technicians and crash investigators would travel to Tanzania "as soon as possible - today, if there is a flight" to make arrangements for the bodies to be repatriated to Comoros, Afraitane said.

Yemenia flight IY626 plunged into the ocean on the last, Sana'a-Moroni leg of its flight from Paris after failing in its first attempt at landing at Moroni in windy weather. Most of the passengers were Comorans living in France.

Of the 153 people onboard, only a 12-year-old French girl of Comoran origin survived. She was found clinging to wreckage several hours later.

- SAPA