Sole survivor of plane crash horror doesn't know rest of family are dead

THE Dutch boy who was the only survivor of a plane crash that killed 103 people has not yet been told his parents and older brother were killed.

Ruben van Assouw, nine, is recovering in hospital, unaware that his mother, father and older brother Enzo, 11, all died when the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330-200 crashed as it arrived in the Libyan capital Tripoli from Johannesburg on Wednesday.

The family had been on holiday in South Africa to celebrate the parents' 12-and-a-half-year wedding anniversary – a tradition in the Netherlands.

Ed Kronenburg, a Dutch foreign ministry official, said he visited Ruben in hospital yesterday and the boy was awake and talking but dizzy from anaesthesia after undergoing surgery on Wednesday for multiple fractures to his legs.

He said an aunt and an uncle who flew in from the Netherlands also visited him yesterday and the boy smiled when he saw them.

"He's awake. He's talking. He is listening. Of course, he also sleeps quite a lot because he got anaesthesia and is still a bit dizzy," Mr Kronenburg said.

"He hasn't been told yet, as far as we know, that his parents died."

A bouquet of white flowers, the traditional colour for mourning, was yesterday propped against the door of the van Assouw family home – a two-storey brick town house in Tilburg, 70 miles south of Amsterdam.

Dr Hameeda al-Saheli, the head of the paediatric unit at the Libyan hospital where the boy is being treated, said he was breathing normally and his vital organs were intact. She told the official Libyan news agency he had suffered four fractures in his legs and lost a lot of blood, but his neck, skull and brain were not affected and he had not suffered internal bleeding.

Mr Kronenburg said the injured boy had been found at one end of the crash site, about half a mile from the large tail section of the plane – something that could indicate he had been sitting at the front of the plane.

Rescuers at the scene noticed he was breathing.

He said he visited the boy after he had four and a half hours of surgery on his leg fractures. Ruben's aunt, Ingrid van Assouw, and an uncle, Jeroen van der Sande, had also visited him after flying to Libya.

The Dutch authorities said the boy would be flown home to the Netherlands "as soon as his health permits". Mr Kronenburg said that could be as early as this weekend.

The Airbus was completing a flight of more than seven hours across the African continent when it crashed. More than half of the crash victims were Dutch tourists who had been holidaying in South Africa.

Libyan transport minister Mohammed Zaidan said a joint investigation into the cause of the crash was under way involving investigators from the United States, France, South Africa, the Netherlands and Libya. The two black boxes recovered from the crash site had been turned over to the team.

Afriqiyah Airways said Flight 771 had been carrying 93 passengers and 11 crew. It said the passengers included 58 Dutch nationals and two Britons. All the crew members were Libyan.

However, the Dutch foreign ministry said it now believed 70 Dutch people had been among those killed.

WELSH MOTHER AMONG VICTIMS

A MOTHER of two from Wales was among the victims of the Libyan plane crash.

Priscilla Collick, 52, from Swansea, had been on her way home after visiting relatives in South Africa, her elder son, Sean Collick, 24, said.

The other victims included Irish writer Bree O'Mara, 42, who lived in South Africa and had been flying to London to sign a book deal after being delayed by the Icelandic volcano ash.

She missed last month's London Book Fair because of flight cancellations caused by the ash cloud from the volcano, and put off her trip until this week.

Ms O'Mara had been due to meet British publishers to sign a contract for her latest novel, Nigel Watson, Superhero, which is set in London.