THEY saw buffalo and ostrich, elephants and gnus. They hugged by a beautiful waterfall and watched the sinking sun turn the waters of an African river to gold.
Like many other travelling families in the digital age, the van Assouws of Tilburg, Holland, shared their photographs online even before their holiday was over. They could never have dreamt that their cheerful, illustrated blog would become a memorial to unthinkable family tragedy. 
The crash of an Afriqiyah Airways Airbus on its approach to Tripoli airport on Wednesday not only robbed Ruben van Assouw, 9, of both his parents and his elder brother, but added another bewildering mystery to one of the darkest chapters of aviation history.
As the sole survivor of a crash that killed 103 crew members and passengers, among them two Britons, Ruben joined a select group of children who have somehow emerged alive from conflagrations of shattered wreckage and burning fuel.
Like Bahia Bakari, the 12-year-old girl who was saved from the Indian Ocean last year after the crash of a Yemeni Airbus killed all the other 152 passengers on board, Ruben can scarcely be described as lucky.
No comments:
Post a Comment