Plane disaster boy in satisfactory condition

The boy who survived a plane crash that killed 103 people in the Libyan capital is in satisfactory condition after surgery on his shattered legs, doctors said today.

Hameeda al-Saheli, the head of the paediatric unit at the Libyan hospital where the Dutch boy was treated, said that he is breathing normally and his vital organs are intact.

The official Libyan news agency has identified the survivor as 10-year-old Ruben van Ashout.

But a Dutch newspaper said the boy is likely to be nine-year-old Ruben van Assouw. His grandmother, An van de Sande, told the newspaper that Ruben was in South Africa with his brother and parents.

The Afriqiyah Airways plane crashed on Wednesday as it approached the runway at Tripoli Airport. Two Britons and an Irish citizen were among the victims.

The boy was shown on Libyan TV breathing through an oxygen mask with multiple intravenous lines connected to his body and a monitor at his bedside.

He underwent surgery for multiple fractures in both legs after being pulled from the debris of the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus that crashed minutes before landing in Tripoli after a seven-hour flight across the African continent from Johannesburg.

About half of the crash victims were Dutch tourists who had been on holiday in South Africa.

Dr Al-Saheli said the boy suffered four fractures in his legs and lost a lot of blood, but she said his neck, skull and brain were not affected by the crash and he did not suffer internal bleeding.

Officials had no immediate explanation for the boy's survival. There have been at least five cases this decade of a single survivor in a commercial plane crash. Last summer, a young girl was found clinging to wreckage 13 hours after a plane went down in the water off the Comoros Islands.

"The idea of a lone survivor might seem a fluke, but it has happened several times," said Patrick Smith, an American airline pilot and aviation author.

In a field near the Tripoli Airport runway, little was left of the Afriqiyah Airbus.

Libya's transport minister, Mohammed Zaidan, said the plane's two black boxes had been found and turned over to analysts. He said the cause of the crash is under investigation, but authorities have ruled out a terrorist attack.

Afriqiyah Airways said Flight 771 was carrying 93 passengers and 11 crew.

It said the passengers included 58 Dutch, six South Africans, two Libyans, two Austrians, one German, one Zimbabwean, one French and two British. The nationality of 19 more passengers have yet to be established, it said in a later statement. All 11 crew members were Libyan.

Many of the passengers were booked to travel from Tripoli on to other destinations in Europe.