The outlines of a miraculous story began to emerge Wednesday as French officials and her relatives related details of how the sole survivor of the crash of a Yemeni airliner, a girl from the southern suburbs of Paris, had managed to cling to wreckage in the Indian Ocean for more than 13 hours until she was rescued.

The father described the girl, Bahia Bakari, as a “fragile” girl who could “barely swim,” in the account he gave French radio. He said she described to him how she found herself beside the wrecked plane in the water. He did not give her age, but other reports put her between 12 and 14 years old.

Her mother, who he said was travelling with her, appeared to be among the lost.

The girl’s account seemed to indicate that others had survived the initial impact. “She couldn’t feel anything,” her father, Kassim Bakari said, according to news reports. “She heard people speaking around her, but she couldn’t see anyone in the darkness.”

There were 153 people aboard Yemenia Airways Flight 626 — 142 passengers and 11 crew members — when the plane, an Airbus 310-300, crashed in heavy winds on approach to the airport in Moroni, the capital of the Comoros islands hours before dawn Tuesday.

Officials said that the search for survivors continued in the deep waters around the crash site, about 10 miles off the coast of Grand Comore, but they said that heavy winds and rough seas diminished the chances of finding anyone else alive.

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