SAN FRANCISCO, April 26 (UPI) -- The mother of a teenager who survived a more-than four-hour flight from California to Hawaii in an airplane wheel well said the boy had just been told she was alive after believing her dead for years.
Sixteen-year-old Yahya Abdi had stowed away inside the wheel well of a Hawaiian Airlines flight in temperatures possibly as low as 80 degrees below zero and low oxygen.
The boy's mother, Ubah Mohamed Abdulle, a refugee in eastern Ethiopia, said she was told Yahya risked his life to find her.
She said he had recently been told she was alive after his father had told her she was dead. Abdulle said the boy's father had taken her three children eight years ago without her knowledge and she hadn't been allowed phone access to them.
Abdulle appealed to the U.S. government and other international organizations to reunite her with her children.
“I am a mom who feels the pain of her fragmented family, some people told me how bad they [my kids] were treated,” she said.
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