Amsterdam: Still groggy from surgery, the Dutch boy who was the sole survivor of a Libyan plane crash that killed 103 people greeted an aunt and uncle with a smile on Thursday after they rushed to his hospital room from Holland.
But a Dutch Foreign Ministry official said nine-year-old Ruben van Assouw still may not realise the full extent of his loss because he has not yet been told his parents and older brother were killed in the crash on Wednesday.
The official, Ed Kronenburg, said that his mother, father and older brother all apparently died in the crash of an airliner arriving in the Libyan capital Tripoli from Johannesburg, South Africa on Wednesday.
Ruben, his brother Enzo and their parents Trudy and Patrick van Assouw had gone to South Africa during the boys' spring school vacation to celebrate the couple's 12-and-a-half year wedding anniversary, a Dutch tradition.
In his travel blog, Patrick Van Assouw, wrote about the camping trip that took them through some of the world's most spectacular natural wonders, South Africa's Mac Mac Falls, the Kruger National Park game reserve and across the border into Swaziland and on to Lesotho.
Kronenburg, the permanent undersecretary of the Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry, said he visited Ruben in the hospital on Thursday after undergoing surgery on Wednesday on multiple fractures in his legs.
"He's awake and he's talking and listening, of course he also sleeps quite a lot because, you know, he got anaesthesia yesterday and he's still a bit dizzy," Kronenburg said.
Dr. Sediek Ben Dellah, who operated on the boy, said Ruben was still in shock following the crash.
However, "he is smiling, he's asking questions, saying that he wants to eat, he wants to drink and so on," Dellah added.
During a news conference in Hoofddoorp, the Netherlands, the Dutch Foreign Minister, Maxime Verhagen said Ruben's aunt and uncle visited him in hospital on Thursday and the boy was happy to see "two familiar faces at his bedside".
Rescuers found Ruben still strapped into his seat at one end of a large debris field after Wednesday's crash as the plane was landing in the Libyan capital Tripoli, said a Libyan safety official.
The official said Ruben was semi-conscious and unresponsive, bleeding moderately from the wounds to his legs.
As they began moving him around, the shock began to wear off and he felt the pain in his legs, but he did not cry a lot.
Ruben was found about half-a-mile from a big piece of the tail section, indicating he may have been sitting in the front of the plane when it shattered into pieces.
The plane impacted in a large sandy lot before the runway, leaving a long, narrow trail of wreckage, more than 150 metres and about 25 metres wide.
The tail, with its colourful Afriqiyah logo, is the largest piece of wreckage, surrounded by shredded plan parts and scattered personal effects.
Dr. Hameeda al-Saheli, the head of the paediatric unit at the hospital where the boy is being treated, said he is breathing normally and his vital organs are intact.
She told the official Libyan news agency he suffered four fractures in his legs and lost a lot of blood, but his neck, skull and brain were not affected and he did not suffer internal bleeding.
Libyan television showed images of Ruben lying on a hospital bed after the crash, breathing through an oxygen mask with his head bandaged and face bruised and swollen.
Dutch officials said Ruben could be flown back to Holland as early as this weekend.
In the boy's hometown of Tilburg, a bouquet of white flowers wrapped in pink tissue was propped on Thursday against the door of the van Assouw's home, a two-story brick town house in a quiet neighbourhood of the city some 70 miles (115 kilometres) south of Amsterdam.
The Airbus A330-200 was completing a more than seven-hour flight across the African continent from Johannesburg when it crashed.
More than half of the crash victims were Dutch tourists who had been vacationing in South Africa.
Libyan Transportation Minister Mohammed Zaidan told The Associated Press that a joint investigation into the cause of the crash was under way involving investigators from the United States, France, South Africa, the Netherlands and Libya.
He said the two black boxes recovered from the crash site had been turned over to the team but he wouldn't comment further pending the investigation's completion.
Officials also had no immediate explanation for how the boy survived the crash that killed everyone else on the plane.
Afriqiyah Airways said Flight 771 was carrying 93 passengers and 11 crew.
It said the passengers included 58 Dutch, six South Africans, two Libyans, two Austrians, one German, one Zimbabwean, one French and two British.
The nationality of 19 more passengers have yet to be established, it said in a later statement. All 11 crew members were Libyan, it added.
However, Verhagen said the foreign ministry now believes 70 Dutch people were among those killed, including 61 who apparently had been booked by two travel agencies.