French officials announced that the black box from the crashed Yemenia Airways jet which plunged into the Indian Ocean was in fact not found contradicting earlier reports that the boxes had been found.

According to the French army, the signal detected from the debris of the downed plane was from a distress beacon and not one of the plane's black boxes.

Commander Bertrand Mortemard de Boisse has told The Associated Press that the frequency of the signal detected corresponded to one of the plane's distress beacons, the Associated Press reported.

Earlier on Wednesday Abdul-Khaliq al-Qadi, the Yemenia Airways head, said in a news conference as a preliminary decision the black boxes had been recovered.

Al-Qadi said the company would pay 20,000 Euro ($28,140) in compensation to the victims' families.

The Airbus A310-300 destined for Comoros islands crashed went down on Tuesday morning with 153 people on board as it came in to land at Moroni, the Comoran capital.

There is one reported survivor from the crash, a 14-year-old girl who managed to survive by clinging onto aircraft debris floating in the ocean.

The girl was found with a fractured collar bone and cuts on her face, is in a stable condition and recovering in a Moroni hospital.

An official complete list of passenger names and nationalities is yet to be published.