Global General
'Miracle' boy who survived Libya crash doing well
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-05-13 17:25
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TRIPOLI, Libya - The Dutch boy who survived a plane crash that killed 103 people in the Libyan capital is in satisfactory condition after surgery on his shattered legs, doctors said Thursday.
The official Libyan news agency identified the survivor as 10-year-old Ruben van Ashout, but a Dutch newspaper offered a different spelling and age.
The Brabants Dagblad daily in the southern Netherlands said he might be 9-year-old Ruben van Assouw from the city of Tilburg. His grandmother, An van de Sande, told the paper Ruben was in South Africa on safari with his brother and parents, who were celebrating their wedding anniversary.
She told the paper that she had not personally seen the television footage of the survivor, but other family members who had were not certain that the boy was their relative.
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The boy was shown on Libyan TV breathing through an oxygen mask with multiple intravenous lines connected to his body and a monitor at his bedside.
He underwent surgery for multiple fractures in both legs after being pulled from the debris of the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus that crashed minutes before landing in Tripoli after a more than seven-hour flight across the African continent from Johannesburg.
About half of the crash victims were Dutch tourists who had been vacationing in South Africa.
Dr. Hameeda al-Saheli, the head of the pediatric unit at the Libyan hospital where he was treated, told the official Libyan news agency Thursday that the boy is breathing normally and his vital organs are intact.
Al-Saheli said the boy suffered four fractures in his legs and lost a lot of blood, but she said his neck, skull and brain were not affected by the crash and he did not suffer internal bleeding.
Officials had no immediate explanation for the boy's survival. 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.
"The idea of a lone survivor might seem a fluke, but it has happened several times," said Patrick Smith, an American airline pilot and aviation author.
In a field near the Tripoli airport runway, little was left of the Afriqiyah Airbus.
Libya's transport minister, Mohammed Zaidan, said the plane's two black boxes had been found and turned over to analysts. He said the cause of the crash was under investigation, but authorities had ruled out a terrorist attack.
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.
Many of the passengers were booked to travel from Tripoli on to other destinations in Europe.
Nasrawi reported from Cairo. Associated Press Writer Arthur Max in Amsterdam contributed to this report.
