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.
Bakari, dressed all in white and praised for her bravery by judges and lawyers, delivered powerful testimony in a room heavy with emotion. 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.
Today, “I don’t suffer any physical effects, but my mother is gone. I was very close to her,” she said, in tears. Bakari, who describes herself as “a proud Comorian,” stood with the more than 250 plaintiffs, who mostly come from Comoros, in a packed courtroom. The trial was broadcast live in a courtroom in Marseille, where many victims came from.