Crash survivor yet to be told of family’s fate

THE nine-year-old sole survivor of the Libyan plane crash has not yet been told that his parents and older brother were killed in the crash, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said.

Doctors said Dutch boy Ruben van Assouw was out of danger after surgery on his shattered legs and was able to smile at relatives in his hospital room yesterday.

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

His aunt and uncle arrived in Tripoli to see him yesterday and the hospital said he immediately recognised them and smiled when they went into his room.

Ruben was pulled from the debris of the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus that crashed minutes before landing in Tripoli killing 103 others on board.

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.