Raw Story, AFP-A Yemeni passenger jet crashed off the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Comoros with 153 people on board, officials said, in the latest air disaster involving an Airbus.
"The plane crashed in the early hours of the morning several nautical miles off the Comoros islands, with 142 passengers and 11 crew aboard," an official with the Yemeni national carrier Yemenia said.
"Most of the passengers are French or from the Comoros," the official said, adding that rescue boats had been sent to the scene of the crash to hunt for possible survivors.
It is the latest air disaster involving Airbus since an Air France jet plunged into the Atlantic almost a month ago with 228 people on board.
"Yemenia regrets to announce the missing of its flight No IY626 from Sanaa to Moroni with 142 passengers and 11 crew onboard Airbus 310-300," was the announcement on the airline’s website.
It gave two emergency contact numbers, +967-1250-800 and +967-1250-833.
There was no immediate information about the possible cause of the crash.
"Rescue boats from the Comoros and Madagascar are taking part in the search operation," a Yemeni official told AFP, adding that the crash occurred about three kilometres from the coast.
An airport source in Paris, where the flight originated, said the aircraft had apparently "crashed into the sea several kilometres from the coast" as it was coming in to land in Moroni, capital of the Comoros.
It was was due to have touched down in Moroni at around 2300 GMT on Monday.
Yemeni Transport Minister Khaled al-Wazir is due to give a press conference about the disaster later in the day, officials said.
The flight started at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport on Monday when an Airbus A330-200 aircraft took off for Marseille in southern France and then on to Sanaa, the capital of Yemen.
In Sanaa, passengers changed to an Airbus A310 and departed for Moroni via Djibouti.
A crisis task force was set up at Charles de Gaulle airport, where 67 people had boarded the plane.
An Airbus A330 operated by Air France crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1 as it was flying from Brazil to France but the cause has not yet been determined.
Yemenia was set up in 1978 and is 51 percent owned by the Yemeni government and 49 percent by the government in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, according to its website.
UPDATE:
Military boats and planes fanned out off the capital, Moroni, searching for debris and survivors. News services reported that a child had been pulled alive from the sea. The child’s age initially was given as 5, but later reported as 14.
The airliner was inspected in 2007 by French transportation authorities who "noticed a certain number of faults. Since then the plane had not returned to France," Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau was quoted as telling French TV.
"The company was not on the black list but was subject to stricter checks on our part and was due to be interviewed shortly by the European Union’s safety committee."
"We still do not have information about the reason behind the crash or survivors," Mohammad Sumairi, deputy general manager for Yemenia operations, told Reuters. "The weather conditions were rough: strong wind and high seas. The wind speed recorded on land at the airport was 61 kilometers [38 miles] an hour. There could be other factors."
The Yemen news agency Saba reported: "Preliminary reports blamed the crash on tough weather."
The crash is the second time in a month that an Airbus has slammed into the ocean. All 228 people aboard an Air France Airbus 330 were killed when the plane crashed off the coast of Brazil on June 1.
Comoros, a volcanic archipelago off the eastern coast of Africa, proclaimed its independence from France in 1975. Money sent home by Comoros islanders living in France is an important part of the tiny nation’s economy.
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