A severely bruised young girl believed to be the only survivor of an Indian Ocean plane crash flew back to Paris, where she was embraced gently by her father, who tried to lift her spirits with a joke.

Bahia Bakari, 14, returned to France from the Comoros Islands on a French government plane. The Falcon-900 jet with medical facilities left the archipelago nation, a former French colony, and arrived at Le Bourget airport just north of Paris.

Yemenia Flight 626 crashed on Tuesday morning off Comoros amid heavy winds. Bahia spent over 13 hours in the water clinging to wreckage before she was rescued. She was found suffering from hypothermia, a fractured collarbone and widespread bruises to her face, her elbow and her foot.

The other 152 people on the plane, including her mother and others from France's large Comoran community, are presumed dead.

Bahia's father, Kassim, met her as she arrived, saying he was relieved and overjoyed to see his daughter even as he mourned his wife. Several other family members joined the airport reunion before an ambulance took the girl to the Armand-Trousseau Children's Hospital in eastern Paris.

France's cooperation minister, Alain Joyandet said Bahia was told "that her mother is missing."

Bahia, the eldest of four children, had boarded a plane in Paris with her mother, Aziza, on Monday morning for a long journey via Marseille and San'a, Yemen, to Comoros where they planned to spend part of the summer with relatives. Her three siblings had stayed behind with her father.

"She says instructions were given to passengers and that then she felt something like electricity, as if she had been a bit electrocuted," Joyandet said. "And suddenly there was this big sound. She found herself in the water." At one point, he said, Bahia fell asleep, clinging to a piece of debris.

In the Comoros, French and US officials directed the search for survivors. Alain Baulin, a commander with the French Foreign Legion, said military planes spotted what appear to be life jackets floating in the sea and divers were sent to the scene.

The French air accident investigation agency BEA sent a team of investigators and Airbus experts to Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 2,900 kilometers south of Yemen, between Africa's southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar.

France's transport minister, Dominique Bussereau said that "worrying anomalies" in the crashed Airbus A310 jet included broken seats for crew and passengers, out-of-date operation manuals, insufficient pressure on emergency exit doors and unrestrained equipment in the baggage hold. French aviation authorities flagged the problems with the plane during a 2007 inspection.

Yemenia's lawyer in France, however, said it was too early to say that the plane's condition was the cause of the accident.

Off the coast of the Comoros islands, ships searched for survivors, bodies and wreckage, even as hope faded of finding anyone alive in the choppy seas. "Up to this moment, there have been no bodies, nor any other survivor," said Jean Youssouf, director-general of El Maarouf Hospital in Moroni.

"Because of the wind, the rough sea, we have not been able to recover any bodies," said Ramoulati Ben Ali, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent Society of Comoros.