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.

Agence France-Presse said the family lived in Corbeil Essonnes, a southern Parisian suburb. Miss Bakari is of Comoran descent.

Sixty-six French citizens were on the flight, and Alain Joyandet, France’s minister for international cooperation, went to Moroni to assist authorities there. After visiting Bakari in the hospital, he called her survival “a true miracle” and relayed what she had said about her ordeal.

“She held on to a piece of the plane from 1.30 am to 3 pm,” Joyandet said. She signalled to a passing boat, and it was able to pick her up. “She really showed incredible physical and moral strength,” he said, adding that she was expected to be transferred Wednesday night to a Paris hospital.

As night broke into day, and Bakari waited for rescue, she grew weaker. One of her rescuers, Sgt. Said Abdilai, told Europe 1 radio that Bakari was too weak to grasp the life ring rescuers threw to her, so he jumped into the sea to get her, according to AP. He said rescuers gave the trembling girl warm water with sugar.

Though she did not speak to reporters herself, Bakari was glimpsed by an AP reporter though a hospital window with bruises on her face and a gauze bandage on her elbow. Said Mohammed, a nurse at El Mararouf hospital in Moroni, said she was doing well. Her uncle told AP that she had a fractured collarbone and that she had not been told yet that her mother was still missing.