"We don´t know if there are any survivors among the 150 people on the plane," Comoros vice-president Idi Nadhoim told Reuters from the airport at the main island´s capital Moroni. [break]
Nadhoim said the accident happened in the early hours of Tuesday, but could not give any more details.
"There is a crash, there is a crash in the sea," said an unnamed official who answered the phone in the Yemenia office in Moroni. He declined further comment.
Yemenia, which is 51 percent owned by the Yemeni government and 49 percent owned by the Saudi Arabian government, flies to Moroni, according to flight schedules on its Web site.
The details of the flight are also unknown, but there was a flight from Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, due about 0230 (0030 BST). That flight was a connecting flight from Paris.
A resident near the airport told the BBC about 100 people were trying to get into the airport to find out more information, but without much success.
The location of the crash was not immediately known, but a medical worker in the town of Mitsamiouli, on the main island Grande Comore, said he had been called into the local hospital.
"They have just called me to come to the hospital. They said a plane had crashed," he told Reuters.
A Comoran police source said the plane was believed to have come down in the sea. "We really have no sea rescue capabilities," he said.
The Comoros covers three small volcanic islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan and Moheli, in the Mozambique channel, 300 km (190 miles) northwest of Madagascar and a similar distance east of the African mainland.
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