Ruben van Assouw, 10, was the sole survivor after a plane exploded upon landing on May 12, 2010 in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, killing all 103 people on board.
Dutch boy
Incredibly, the boy was thrown violently when the plane broke apart, when it was only about 1 meter above the ground.
The Dutch boy was rescued from the wreckage of the Airbus A330-200, a large plane belonging to Afriqiyah Airways, a Libyan airline. Doctors operated on him for four hours that night.
An Afriqiyah Airways A330
His legs were broken in several places and he was still unable to move parts of his body hours after surgery. It is believed his brain may have been damaged in the accident.
When the doctors asked him where he was from, Ruben managed to mumble, “ Holland, Holland .”
Ruben is believed to be one of only 14 survivors of a major plane crash in the world as of 2010. His parents both died in the crash.
Ruben van Assouw's remarkable survival recalls the case of 12-year-old Bahia Bakari, the sole survivor when a Yemenia Air Airbus 310 crashed into the Indian Ocean in June 2009, killing 152 people.
Weather conditions and visibility were good at the time and officials have ruled out terrorism.
Boy Ruben van Assouw
Afriqiyah Airways is not on the European Union's list of banned airlines, which includes nearly 300 airlines that the EU says do not meet international safety standards.
On February 28, 2013, the Libyan Civil Aviation Authority announced that it had determined that the cause of the crash was pilot error. Fatigue was also considered a possible contributing factor.
Before Ruben or Bakari, there were other miraculous escapes from plane crashes for children. On December 24, 2007, a small Cessna carrying four Americans crashed in bad weather in a remote, high-altitude jungle area in Panama. Francesca Lewis, 13, was found alive two days after the crash, when rescuers finally arrived. Dressed in just shorts and a T-shirt, she suffered from hypothermia and a broken arm. Reports at the time said she survived the freezing temperatures because a pile of luggage had fallen on top of her.
In the crash, pilot Edwin Lasso from Panama, American businessman Michael Klein and Klein's 13-year-old daughter Talia, were killed. Francesca was a close friend of Talia.
Francesca endured two days in the rugged mountains of Panama in freezing temperatures and heavy rain before rescuers found her in the rubble on Christmas Day.
Francesca’s mother said her daughter was clearly delirious when rescuers found her under the wing of the crashed plane. “She thought she was home and wondered why there was a wing in her house,” said Valerie Lewis.
" I think her body is in survival mode," said Lewis.
Rescue teams trekked Francesca for three and a half hours through treacherous terrain to reach a helicopter.
Francesca appears to have fallen out of the plane when the Cessna hit the ground or was ejected when the plane collided, her mother said.
Before Francesca, in 2003, a two-year-old boy survived a crash that killed 115 people. On July 8, 2003, Mohammed el-Fateh Osman, a Sudanese, was hailed by the country's aviation minister as a "miracle from God" when he survived a Boeing 737 crash in Port Sudan that killed 115 people. The boy, who was burned, was found by a nomad lying on a fallen tree.
On January 11, 1995, 10-year-old Erika Delgado lost her parents and younger brother among the 51 victims of an Intercontinental Airlines DC-9 crash near Cartagena, Colombia, but emerged largely unscathed. Twenty-five years later, she told CNN that she regained consciousness half submerged in the Maria La Baja swamp. She later became a national celebrity, hailed as Colombia's "Little Miss Miracle."
Mother and baby in the deep forest
It took just twenty minutes for things to go wrong. Shortly after taking off from the Colombian coastal town of Nuqui, a small plane carrying a pilot and two passengers disappeared from air traffic control radar. It then crashed into the dense jungle to the west, in a location so remote that it took rescuers two days to find the wreckage.
All that remained was a pile of smoky, broken aluminum and the mutilated body of the pilot. The two passengers—a young woman and her infant son—were nowhere to be found. Rescuers’ hopes were raised when they saw the cabin was relatively intact and a door that appeared to have been opened from the inside. The rescue team continued through the wet, densely forested terrain in search of the missing mother and son.
Meanwhile, Maria Nelly Murillo, 18, tried to cross the wilderness. She held her son and carried some young coconuts, which were in her luggage on the plane. The accident happened on Saturday, and the rescue team did not find Maria and her son until the following Wednesday. Both were dehydrated and injured but basically in good health.
“It's a miracle,” Colonel Hector Carrascal of the Colombian Air Force told the BBC . Of the baby's unharmed survival, he said: “ It must have been the spirit of his mother that gave him the strength to survive .”
A rescue worker assists Murillo.
Speaking to the BBC , Ms Murillo's brother Carlos explained that after the plane crashed, Murillo wrenched open the cabin door and dashed into the woods, away from the flames. Missing her child, she turned back to retrieve him, suffering burns to her hands, face and legs in the process.
Worried that the plane might explode, Maria headed for the forest, along a small river, carrying coconuts from the plane’s cargo hold. As she walked, she scattered the remains of the peeled coconuts along the path, hoping they would help rescuers find her. When rescuers still did not appear, she added other clues: leaving behind a flip-flop, the child’s birth certificate, and mobile phones that she had tried and found unusable, according to the Guardian.
About a third of a mile from the crash site, Murillo created a shelter for himself and his son, using large leaves to collect drinking water.
“When it rains, I wake up and get water from some leaves that have water in them and drink it with my child,” she told reporters from her hospital bed in Quibdo, where she was rushed to after surviving the ordeal.
Meanwhile, rescue teams were confused as to where Murillo had gone.
“ We started to worry – we didn’t know what could have happened to them. They could have gotten lost in the forest and were trying to survive or they could have died ,” Carrascal told Bogota Semana magazine.
But the open cabin door made them think that passengers might have escaped alive. So they still walked forward.
It took rescuers a while to realize that the debris Murillo had scattered led to a trail, according to reports. On the third day of searching — Murillo's fifth day in the forest — they began calling out to her over a loudspeaker.
Accounts of what happened next vary. Murillo told the BBC that she returned to the crash site after hearing the call for help. But the search team's account of the moment is far more dramatic.
Red Cross volunteer Acisclo Renteria said the rescue team debated whether to call off the search for the day, and he decided to continue. He noticed a strange swarm of flies hovering over something on the ground.
As he got closer, he realized it was Murillo. She tried to stand, but he told her to wait and called for help. Murillo and her son were airlifted to the hospital, where she was treated for burns, dehydration, and a broken ankle. Her son was unharmed.
“I thank God for helping me save these two people,” Renteria said, according to the Guardian . “ It's amazing. It's an inexplicable feeling.”
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Nguyen Xuan Thuy (Source: Daily Mail, CNN, BBC)
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