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SANAA, Yemen: A Yemeni passenger jet crashed off the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Comoros on Tuesday with 153 people on board, officials said, in the latest air disaster involving an Airbus.
"The plane crashed in the early hours of the morning several nautical miles off the Comoros islands, with 142 passengers and 11 crew aboard," an official with the Yemeni national carrier Yemenia said.
"Most of the passengers are French or from the Comoros," the official said, adding that rescue boats had been sent to the scene of the crash to hunt for possible survivors.
It is the latest air disaster involving Airbus since an Air France jet plunged into the Atlantic almost a month ago with 228 people on board.
"Yemenia regrets to announce the missing of its flight No IY626 from Sanaa to Moroni with 142 passengers and 11 crew onboard Airbus 310-300," was the announcement on the airline's website.
It gave two emergency contact numbers, +967-1250-800 and +967-1250-833.
There was no immediate information about the possible cause of the crash.
"Rescue boats from the Comoros and Madagascar are taking part in the search operation," a Yemeni official told AFP, adding that the crash occurred about three kilometres from the coast.
An airport source in Paris, where the flight originated, said the aircraft had apparently "crashed into the sea several kilometres from the coast" as it was coming in to land in Moroni, capital of the Comoros.
It was was due to have touched down in Moroni at around 2300 GMT on Monday.
Yemeni Transport Minister Khaled al-Wazir is due to give a press conference about the disaster later in the day, officials said.
The flight started at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport on Monday when an Airbus A330-200 aircraft took off for Marseille in southern France and then on to Sanaa, the capital of Yemen.
In Sanaa, passengers changed to an Airbus A310 and departed for Moroni via Djibouti.
A crisis task force was set up at Charles de Gaulle airport, where 67 people had boarded the plane.
An Airbus A330 operated by Air France crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1 as it was flying from Brazil to France but the cause has not yet been determined.
Yemenia was set up in 1978 and is 51 per cent owned by the Yemeni government and 49 per cent by the government in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, according to its website.
- AFP/yb
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