Sole Crash Survivor Goes Home

Ruben van Assouw, the 9-year-old boy who miraculously survived the Libyan plane crash that killed his parents and everyone else on board, has returned home to the Netherlands. The boy landed at a Dutch military base and was transferred to an ambulance with blackened windows and taken to an unnamed hospital with his aunt, uncle, and the Libyan doctor who has been treating him. Authorities are working hard to shield van Assouw from the glare of massive international media attention in the wake of the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330 crash Wednesday. (The child was found at the accident site, still strapped to his chair, with broken legs. He told a Dutch newspaper that he couldn’t remember the crash, just that his legs really hurt and he wanted to go home.) After a Dutch foreign ministry spokesman announced that the boy had safely arrived, he warned, "This concludes the news about Ruben… There won't be any more information, any more updates."