THE IRISH citizen who was among the 103 people who died in Wednesday’s air crash at Libya’s Tripoli airport was on her way to London hoping to finalise a publishing contract.
Bree O’Mara (42) was born in South Africa to Irish parents and carried an Irish passport. She grew up in Durban, South Africa where her parents had eloped to get married.
Irish-born soldier Mike Hoare was her uncle, according to her website. Nicknamed Mad Mike, he led several mercenary groups in the Congo crisis of the 1960s and the Seychelles in the 1970s.
O'Mara had been due to sign the book deal for her second novel, Nigel Watson Superhero, in April. However, she had to postpone her visit to London because of the volcanic ash cloud.
She lived in North West Province in South Africa and was married to a chef, Christopher Leach.
Before becoming an author, O’Mara worked in theatre, film production, the media and advertising. She had travelled widely and had lived in London and with the Masai tribe in Tanzania.
Meanwhile yesterday, aviation experts combed debris for more clues after finding the two black boxes from the crashed Airbus jet .
The sole survivor of Afriqiyah Airways Flight 8U771 was a nine-year-old Dutch boy returning from a safari holiday with his family in South Africa, a Dutch newspaper reported.
Libya’s government has ruled out an attack on the Airbus A330-200 that was flying from Johannesburg when it came down short of the runway early on Wednesday.
Experts from the Netherlands, United States and South Africa, a technical team from manufacturer Airbus and Libya’s civil aviation authority began sifting through the scattered remains of the Airbus yesterday.
They will back up a committee investigating the crash, Libya’s transport minister said. “We are going to give full co-operation to this committee,” Mohamed Zidan told reporters. He said the two black boxes containing voice and technical data from the flight had been recovered in good condition and had been handed to the committee.
Aviation experts said the almost new Airbus appeared to have hit the ground several hundred metres short of the Tripoli airport runway in visibility of 5-6km (three to four miles).
They said the airport approach lacked systems to provide crew with the aircraft’s distance and height from the runway, although it was too early to say why it hit the ground and broke in pieces. Only the tailfin remained intact.
“Statistically the accident rate for these non-precision approaches is higher than for precision approaches, but we don’t know if that is significant in this case at all,” said Paul Hayes, safety director at aerospace information provider Ascend.
Seventy Dutch citizens died in the crash, the Dutch foreign affairs ministry. There had been uncertainty about the young survivor’s identity but the ministry said: “An employee from the Dutch embassy in Tripoli talked to him. He told them his name is Ruben and he is nine years old and from Tilburg. He is doing reasonably well considering the circumstances.” The boy had suffered leg fractures but was in a stable condition, doctors said.
A woman said to be the boy's grandmother told Dutch paper Brabants Dagbladthat he had been travelling with his 11-year-old brother Enzo and parents Trudy and Patrick van Assouw.
The ministry said an aunt and uncle had landed in Tripoli and would quickly visit the boy at the hospital.
The Rotsteeg family from the Dutch village Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht lost their two daughters, Joyce (25) and Julia (21), Dutch daily De Telegraafreported.
“It is terrible, a drama. These are their only two children,” the girls’ aunt was quoted as saying.
The aircraft is the same type as Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic on June 1st last year. The cause of that crash has not been firmly identified. – (Reuters)