A Yemeni Airbus A310 jet carrying 153 people crashed into rough seas as it came into land in the Comoros Islands on Tuesday but rescuers plucked a child survivor from the water, officials said.
It was the second time in less than a month that an Airbus has crashed into the ocean. This time French authorities said the Yemeni carrier had been under surveillance and that problems had been reported with the jet.
Bodies and wreckage from the Yemenia airline flight were spotted in the Indian Ocean near the capital, Moroni, aviation officials said.
But a child among the 142 passengers and 11 crew on Flight IY 626 was rescued alive, a surgeon at the main Moroni hospital, Issa Ben Imani, told AFP.
Imani said the child was being taken to land where an ambulance waited to take the child to hospital.
The islands form an archipelago of volcanic islands off the southeast coast of Africa.
Arfachad Salim, a rescue coordinator for the Comoros Red Crescent, confirmed the child was alive and added local fishermen had also found wreckage, passengers' handbags and other effects.
In Sanaa, Yemenia's deputy managing director for operations Mohammed al-Sumairi said three bodies had also been recovered.
No Australians are thought to have been on board the flight, a spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said.
"The Australian embassies in Port Louis, Riyadh and Paris are urgently seeking to confirm the reports and determine whether any Australians are on board," she said.
"We have not had any suggestions that any Australians were involved.
"Comoros Island authorities have advised the embassy in Port Louis that most passengers are from Comoros Island and France."
The long gruelling Flight IY 626 had started in Paris early Monday and made stops in Marseille, Sanaa and Djibouti before heading to Moroni.
Moroni international airport control tower lost contact with the jet just before it was due to land amid bad weather, airport director Hadji Mmadi Ali said.
French civil aviation officials said 66 passengers were French. Three small babies were also among the passengers, officials said.
France sent two navy ships and a plane from its nearby Indian Ocean territories to help the rescue.
"Bodies were seen floating on the surface of the water and a fuel slick was also spotted about 16 or 17 nautical miles from Moroni," senior Yemeni civil aviation official Mohammad Abdel Kader told reporters in Sanaa.
Kader said the wind was blowing in gusts of up to 115km/h an hour when the disaster happened.
Airbus, still reeling from the crash of an Air France A330-320 into the Atlantic on June 1 with 228 people on board, set up a crisis cell straight away and sent investigators to the Comoros.
No cause has yet been announced for the Air France disaster. The black box flight recorders have yet to be found and their signal is due to stop emitting on July 2.
France's Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said inspectors had noted numerous faults on the Yemenia jet and the airline was being closely monitored by EU authorities.
"The A310 in question had been inspected in France in 2007 by the DGAC (French civil aviation authority) and a certain number of faults had been noted," Mr Bussereau said.
Yemenia was not on an EU blacklist "but was being subjected to closer inspection by us and was due to soon be heard by the security committee of the European Union", he said.
Airbus said in a statement the jet had accumulated about 51,900 hours in the air from some 17,300 flights.
A crisis task force was set up at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport while psychologists were on hand at Marseille's airport to comfort the families of passengers on the plane.
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