Libyan crash survivor reunites with relatives

Published 10:50 am Thursday, May 13, 2010

TRIPOLI, Libya — Still groggy from surgery, the Dutch boy who was the sole survivor of a Libyan plane crash that killed 103 people greeted an aunt and uncle with a smile today after they rushed to his hospital room from Holland.

But a Dutch Foreign Ministry official said 9-year-old Ruben van Assouw still may not realize the full extent of his loss because he has not yet been told his parents and older brother were killed in the crash on Wednesday. They were returning home from a family vacation in South Africa to celebrate the parents’ 121⁄2-year wedding anniversary — a Dutch tradition.

“He’s awake. He’s talking. He is listening,” the official, Ed Kronenburg, told The Associated Press after visiting Ruben in the hospital. “Of course he also sleeps quite a lot because he got anesthesia yesterday and is still a bit dizzy,” he added.

“He hasn’t been told yet, as far as we know, that his parents died.”

Rescuers found Ruben still strapped into his seat at one end of a large debris field after Wednesday crash as the plane was landing in the Libyan capital Tripoli, said Libyan safety official Col. Baloul Al-Khoja.

Kronenburg said they noticed he was still breathing.

“That’s why they noticed that he was still alive,” he said.

Khoja said Ruben was semi-conscious and unresponsive, bleeding moderately from the wounds on his legs. As they began moving him around, shock began to wear off and he felt the pain from his legs, but he did not cry a lot.

He was about half a mile from a big piece of the tail section, indicating he may have been sitting in the front of plane when it shattered into pieces.

Kronenburg said Ruben’s mother, father and older brother Enzo, 11, all apparently died in the crash an Afriqiyah Airways flight as it was arriving in the Libyan capital Tripoli from Johannesburg, South Africa. The cause of the crash is not yet known.

Kronenburg, the permanent undersecretary of the Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry, said Ruben’s aunt, Ingrid van Assouw, and an uncle, Jeroen van der Sande, visited him today at the hospital after flying in from Holland.

He said he could not officially confirm their deaths yet “but I think it’s quite likely that his parents and his brother perished.”

He said he visited the boy after he had 41⁄2 hours of surgery on his leg fractures.

“I spoke to the doctors who are treating him and they are very satisfied about his condition. Actually, I’ve seen for myself that he’s OK.”

Dr. Hameeda al-Saheli, the head of the pediatric unit at the hospital where the boy is being treated, said he is breathing normally and his vital organs are intact. She told the official Libyan news agency he suffered four fractures in his legs and lost a lot of blood, but his neck, skull and brain were not affected and he did not suffer internal bleeding.

Libyan television showed images of Ruben Wednesday laying on a hospital bed after the crash, breathing through an oxygen mask with his head bandaged and face bruised and swollen.

Dutch officials said Ruben could be flown back to Holland as early as this weekend.

The Dutch Foreign Ministry said the boy is from the southern city of Tilburg in the Netherlands.

A bouquet of white flowers, the traditional color for mourning, was propped against the door of the van Assouw family home — a two-story brick town house with white curtains covering the windows in a quiet neighborhood of Tilburg, 70 miles south of Amsterdam.

The Airbus A330-200 was completing a more than seven-hour flight across the African continent from Johannesburg when it crashed. More than half of the crash victims were Dutch tourists who had been vacationing in South Africa.

Transportation Minister Mohammed Zaidan told The Associated Press that a joint investigation into the cause of the crash was under way involving investigators from the United States, France, South Africa, the Netherlands and Libya.

He said the two black boxes recovered from the crash site had been turned over to the team but he wouldn’t comment further pending the investigation’s completion.

Officials also had no immediate explanation for how the boy survived the crash that killed everyone else on the plane.

But there have been at least five cases this decade of a single survivor in a commercial plane crash. Last summer, a young girl was found clinging to wreckage 13 hours after a plane went down in the water off the Comoros Islands.

Afriqiyah Airways said Flight 771 was carrying 93 passengers and 11 crew.

It said the passengers included 58 Dutch, six South Africans, two Libyans, two Austrians, one German, one Zimbabwean, one French and two British. The nationality of 19 more passengers have yet to be established, it said in a later statement. All 11 crew members were Libyan, it added.

However, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said it now believes 70 Dutch people were among those killed, including 61 who apparently had been booked by two travel agencies.

Many of the passengers were booked to travel from Tripoli on to other destinations in Europe.

More than 600 A330s have been built since the type entered service in 1994. The Afriqiyah crash is only the second fatal accident involving an A330 in airline service. The other was the crash of Air France flight 447 a year ago off the coast of Brazil.

But last month, an A330 belonging to Cathay Pacific was forced to make an emergency landing in Hong Kong because of engine trouble. Fifty-seven passengers suffered mostly slight injuries in the ensuing evacuation.

The Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department said control problems with the two Rolls-Royce engines forced the Airbus to land at a higher-than-normal speed, damaging an engine cowling, puncturing the tires and causing a small fire in the wheel well.

The pilots reported that they were unable to get the engines to function normally, and that during the approach and landing phase one was operating at 17 percent of thrust while the other was stuck at 70 percent.