The teenager who is thought to be the sole survivor of the Indian Ocean aircraft crash was not wearing a life jacket and could not swim, according to her father.
Rescuers found her in the dark in a sea of bodies, clinging to a piece of debris and surrounded by a fuel slick.
"We tried to throw a lifebuoy but she could not grab it so I had to jump in the water to get her," a police rescuer told France's Europe 1 radio.
Named as Baya Bakari, the 14-year-old girl originally lived in Paris before moving to the southern French city of Marseille, and had been travelling with her mother to the Comoros.
The Yemenia Airways plane with 153 people on board crashed in windy weather on Monday as it came in to land in the Comoros Islands.
Baya is thought to have been 'ejected' from the striken aircraft as it broke up.
Baya's father Kassim Bakari
"She felt nothing, and was found in the water. She heard people talking around her but saw nobody during the night," her father, Kassim Bakari said.
According to her father, waves crashed over his daughter as she fought off extreme tiredness and hypothermia to hold on to the wreckage for up to 12 hours.
She was surrounded by corpses, clothes, suitcases, and even passports and photographs of victims.
Baya managed to climb on to a portion of wreckage - believed to be part of the plane's cabin - but kept slipping back into the oily sea.
"I never thought she would get out like that - it's the Good Lord who wanted it," said Mr Bakari who remains in Paris.
The exhausted girl was pulled from choppy seas at around 4.00am and is now in the at the El Maarouf hospital.
"She is conscious, she is speaking, but we are trying to warm her up because she was freezing," Dr Ada Mansour said.
"We are trying to get her back in shape, but we are not asking her too many questions as not to tire her," he said.
Search craft being readied
The ageing Airbus 310 was coming in to land in Moroni during severe turbulence and howling winds and was on the last leg of a flight from Yemen, with passengers connecting from Paris and Marseille.
Most passengers were from Comoros and 66 were said to be French nationals.
Baya lived with her family, including an uncle, in Marseille's 14th district, and was originally from the archipelago's southeast village of Nioumadzaha.
Dr Mansour added that the earlier reports of a five-year-old boy surviving the crash have not been confirmed.
They were "based on information received from boats near the search site, but I have not seen him," Dr Mansour said.
The French army has arrived from the nearby overseas départment of Réunion with rescue craft and a helicopter will take part today in search operations, Comoran government spokesman Kamaleddin Afraitane said.
Baya's missing mum, Aziza
A French government minister said the plane's black boxes may have been located.
A statement from Airbus said the crashed plane originally went into service in 1990 and had accumulated 51,900 flight hours, and had been operated by Yemenia since 1999.
It was the second fatal Airbus aircraft ocean plunge last month.
Source: News.Sky.Com
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