Comoros Crash: Update

From media reports reaching me, the Yemenia airliner which crashed on Tuesday, June 30, 2009, off Comoros had 153 on board. As of July 15th, no information has surfaced that anyone on board was associated with coelacanth research.

Reports said at the time that the flight contained 66 French citizens and that most of the other passengers were from Comoros. Only one survivor, 14-year-old Bahia Bakari was found alive. She clung to wreckage for 13 hours before being rescued. Her family had taken the flight, on their way from France, coming to Comoros for vacation.

The passengers on the downed plane, an aging Airbus 310, were flying the last leg of a journey from Paris and Marseille to Comoros, with a stop in Yemen to change planes. Most on board were from Comoros, plus the French citizens. Severe turbulence was believed to be a factor in the crash, Yemen’s embassy in Washington said.

“The tragedy prompted an outcry in Comoros, where residents have long complained of a lack of seatbelts on Yemenia flights and planes so overcrowded that passengers had to stand in the aisles,” reported News 24.

As mentioned here recently, a new small bat has been discovered in the Comoros islands.

Also, most famously, Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 2900 km south of Yemen, between Africa’s southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar, is the source of the 1938 discovery of the coelacanth.

If anyone has any word of anyone on board linked to coelacanth research and the Comoran conservation effort, please contact Cryptomundo.

A few months ago, I wrote of how The Daily Mail had published an article about the improbable existence of a “coelacanth curse.”

The end of this story has yet to be told. Stay tuned for further updates on the passenger list, when details become available.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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