Comorans began 30 days of national mourning on Friday for the victims of the Yemenia Airbus crash as France threatened to blacklist the airline over safety concerns.
"From today, our country is in a period of mourning for 30 days," President Ahmed Abdallah Sambi announced on state television late Thursday.
Sambi urged former colonial power France to help establish the cause of the crash - the second affecting the France-based plane-maker in a month.
The president said rescuers had yet to recover any bodies from the sea and appealed for more international help.
A 14-year-old girl, Bahia Bakari, was the sole survivor among the 153 people on board after the airliner crashed into the sea while making a second approach to land at Moroni airport early Tuesday.
Emergency services, including French and US planes, have yet to identify the crash site, as heavy seas had scattered debris over a wide area.
Ali Djambae, the Comoros police commander coordinating the operations, said Friday that divers believed they may have located the site, off Mitsamiouli village north of the capital.
"Our divers identified an area with a slick of fuel in the Mitsamiouli area," Djambae told reporters.
"There are many sharks also swimming around this area."
He added that a yellow door had also been spotted by a US patrol plane.
"We have sent our speedboats to fetch the door and analyse it" to determine whether it is from the Airbus A310.
Alain Bernardini, captain of a French patrol plane, said a wheel, windows and other debris were spotted several hours after the crash on Tuesday, when a plane also picked up a signal from the plane's distress beacon.
Since then, search teams have failed to locate the precise crash spot, he said.
"We are only seeing very scattered debris which we cannot easily identify," Bernardini told reporters aboard the search plane.
French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said on Friday Yemen's official carrier must make "very big efforts" to avoid being blacklisted following the crash.
"This company is under strict surveillance," he told RTL radio.
"If it does not want to go on the black list, it will have to make big efforts, very big efforts."
Yemenia executives were to hold talks later Friday in Paris with senior transport officials after Bussereau spoke of several "worrisome defects" detected during a maintenance check on the doomed Airbus A310 in 2007.
The airline announced on Thursday that it was suspending flights to and from the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, after throngs of Comoran protesters besieged Yemenia's check-in counters at the airport there for two days.
The 19-year-old Yemenia Airbus had been banned from French airspace and European Union officials were also tracking the airline over safety concerns.
Sixty-six French nationals were on board the plane that crashed when the pilot was making a second attempt to land at Moroni airport.
The Yemenia flight left Paris on Monday for Sanaa via Marseille with a modern Airbus A330 but passengers switched to the older A310 jet to continue to Djibouti and Moroni.
Bussereau has been calling for a worldwide blacklist of unsafe airlines.
Yemen's transport minister on Thursday rejected European criticism of Yemenia's safety standards as "unfair".
Khaled al-Wazir told a news conference in Sanaa "one cannot prejudge Yemenia's technical performance in safety matters or those of any other airline before publication of the results of the inquiry."
Yemenia Airways is not on the EU blacklist, which is regularly updated, and contains the names of more than 200 airlines or firms which are either banned from operating in Europe or only allowed under strict restrictions.
Front page
RSS Feed