Tripoli: The Dutch boy who survived a plane crash that killed 103 people in the Libyan capital is doing well after surgery on his shattered legs, doctors said Thursday as details of the child's identity emerged.
A local newspaper in the southern Netherlands said the lone survivor of the crash appeared to be 9-year-old Ruben van Assouw from the city of Tilburg.
His grandmother, An van de Sande, told the paper Ruben was in South Africa on safari with his brother and parents, who were celebrating their wedding anniversary, according to the Brabants Dagblad daily.
She told the paper that she had not personally seen the television footage of the survivor, but other family members who had were not certain that the boy was their relative.
The Dutch Foreign Ministry confirmed the boy had told an embassy official who spoke to him Thursday morning that his name is Reuben, he is 9 years old and he comes from Tilburg.
The ministry did not publish a last name but said the boy's uncle and aunt had arrived in Tripoli and would see him as soon as possible.
"As soon as his health permits he will be brought to the Netherlands," the Foreign Ministry statement said.
The boy had been widely shown in Libyan TV footage laying on a hospital bed after Wednesday's crash but he was breathing through an oxygen mask but his features were largely hidden from view.
He underwent surgery for multiple fractures in both legs after being pulled from the debris of the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330-200 that crashed minutes before landing in Tripoli after a more than seven-hour flight across the African continent from Johannesburg.
About half of the crash victims were Dutch tourists who had been vacationing in South Africa.
Dr. Hameeda Al-Saheli, the head of the pediatric unit at the Libyan hospital where he was treated, told the official Libyan news agency Thursday that the boy is breathing normally and his vital organs are intact.
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.
