Yemenia A310 crashes into the Indian Ocean

An Airbus 310 belonging to Yemenia, Yemen’s national airline, and flying to Moroni, the capital of Grand Comore, fell into the sea a few miles short of its destination. The flight had originally taken off from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport for Sana'a, Yemen's capital, with 147 passengers. In Sana'a, 67 onward bound passengers then changed planes and flew on via Djibouti to Comoros, where the aircraft is thought to have come down in "choppy" weather three to six miles short of Moroni. "The plane has crashed and we still don't know exactly where," said the Comoros' vice-president, Idi Nadhoim, who went immediately to the airport. "We think it's in the area of Mitsamiouli. There were 150 passengers on board."

Television reports suggested that families waiting to meet passengers at Moroni airport saw the plane make an approach to the runway, and turn to make a second attempt. It never returned, disappearing from radar screens shortly afterwards. Sana'a airport later gave a figure of 142 passengers with the remainder being crew. There were no immediate reports of survivors, officials said, though speedboats had been dispatched to the scene. The Comoros is an archipelago nation of three islands between Mozambique and Madagascar off the coast of East Africa. It used to be a French colony and a fourth island, Mayotte, in the archipelago remains under French rule. French military jets based at Mayotte and another Indian Ocean territory, Reunion, were helping with the search for survivors.

"We think the crash is somewhere along its landing approach," Ibrahim Kassim, of the Agency for Aviation Security and Navigation in Africa and Madagascar, said. "The weather is really not very favourable. The sea is very rough." Grand Comore is the largest of the islands, the others being Mohéli and Anjouan. Its 800,000 population makes it one of Africa's smallest countries, but also one of its most densely populated. Yemen, which occupies the southernmost part of the Arabian peninsula, is often troubled by Islamist, sectarian and tribal violence, and the authorities there are still looking for a Briton and and a German family of five kidnapped there earlier this month. However, there are no initial suspicions of terrorist involvement on this occasion.