French planes hunted today for the flight recorder from a plane that crashed into deep water off the Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros.
A 14-year-old girl was plucked from the rough seas yesterday after clinging to wreckage through the night, but hope of finding any of the other 152 people aboard was fading.
"No bodies have been recovered by the French and American military rescue teams, nor by the Comoran army rescue boats. No body has been found since the crash," said Interior Minister Hamid Bourhane.
An official from the regional air security body ASECNA said a French naval officer taking part in the search told him the wreck was an estimated 350-500 metres (1,150 to 1,640 feet) below the surface.
The Yemenia Airbus A310-300 was coming in to land at Moroni, the Comoran capital, on the final leg of a trip from Paris and Marseille to Comoros via Yemen.
The airline said the passengers were 75 Comorans and 65 French nationals along with one Palestinian and one Canadian. The crew comprised six Yemenis, two Moroccans, one Indonesian, one Ethiopian and a Filipina.
The sole survivor, a Franco-Comoran girl identified as Bakari Bahia, had cuts to her face and a fractured collar-bone. France said she would be flown to a Paris hospital.
The crashed plane was the second Airbus to plunge into the sea within a month. An Air France Airbus A330-200 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 228 people on board, after taking off from Brazil on June 1.
The Paris-Marseille-Yemen leg of the Yemenia flight was flown by an Airbus A330. In Sanaa, those passengers flying on to the Comoros changed onto a second plane, the A310 that crashed.
The cause of the crash was still unknown. State-run Yemenia said the flight recorder - the so-called black box - had been located, but this was denied by the French defence ministry.
"The Transall (a French search plane) picked up a signal from the Airbus' distress beacon and not the black box," a ministry spokesman said in Paris.
The European Commission sent a letter to the airline saying its planes could be banned in the European Union if it failed to provide reassurances it was dealing with recurring safety issues.
EU officials said yesterday problems had been found in the doomed aircraft in 2007, but Yemenia avoided a ban by raising its standards shortly afterwards. France banned this specific Yemenia A310 from its airspace after the faults were found.
Yemen's transport minister said the plane was thoroughly checked in May under Airbus supervision. "It was in line with international standards," Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer said.
As a flotilla of boats took to sea off the main Grande Comore island at first light, angry Comoran expatriates tried to block passengers from checking into another Yemenia flight from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to Yemen.
"We don't want any more coffins travelling. We don't want Yemenia any more," said protester Idris Ahmed.
About 60 people who had been due to fly did not check in, but some 100 did and the flight took off.
With a population of about 800,000, the formerly French-ruled Comoros archipelago comprises three islands off mainland east Africa, just northwest of Madagascar.
France and the Comoros have enjoyed close ties since the islands' independence in 1975. France estimates 200,000 people from Comoros live in mainland France.
Reuters