France dismisses talk that Air Algerie plane was shot down

PARIS — French soldiers yesterday secured the black box from the Air Algerie wreckage site in a desolate region of restive northern Mali, French President Francois Hollande said. Terrorism has not been ruled out as a cause, though officials have said the most possible reason for the catastrophe that killed all on board was bad weather.

At least 116 people were killed in the disaster on Thursday, nearly half of whom were French. Mr Hollande put the number of victims at 118, a discrepancy that could not be immediately clarified.

One of two black boxes was recovered from the wreckage in the Gossi region of Mali near the border with Burkina Faso and taken to the northern city of Gao where a French contingent is based, Mr Hollande told reporters after an emergency meeting with government ministers.

“There are, alas, no survivors,’’ he said. “I share the pain of families living through this terrible ordeal.’’

A team of French air-accident investigators was being sent to Mali, he said.

Air Algerie and private Spanish airline Swiftair, which operated Flight 5017, said on Thursday that 116 people had been on board.

French television showed images of the crash site taken by a soldier from Burkina Faso. The brief footage showed a desolate area with bits of twisted metal but no identifiable parts, such as the fuselage or tail, or bodies.

Burkina soldiers were reportedly the first to reach the site, apparently on Thursday evening, and the images were viewed at the Burkina Faso crisis centre.

General Gilbert Diendere, a close aide to Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore and head of the crisis committee set up to investigate the disaster, said of the footage: “People expected to see an airplane sitting somewhere, and unfortunately, it was debris scattered over 500m, which made the search of the area very, very difficult.’’

Burkina Faso Prime Minister Luc-Adolphe Tiao reviewed the videos and said identifying the victims would be challenging. “It will be difficult to reconstitute the bodies of the victims,” he said at a news conference. “The human remains are so scattered.”

A French Reaper drone based in Niger initially spotted the wreckage, French Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier told France Info radio yesterday. “We sent men, with the agreement of the Mali government, to the site, and they found the wreckage of the plane with the help of the inhabitants of the area,’’ Gen Diendere said.

Many of the passengers had been scheduled to head to Europe after the plane was due to arrive in the Algerian capital of Algiers from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital.

Mr Holland has said France would spare no effort to uncover why the plane went down — the third major plane disaster around the world within a week. The vast deserts and mountains of northern Mali fell under control of ethnic Tuareg separatists and then Al Qaeda-linked Islamic extremists after a military coup in 2012.

“There are hypotheses, notably weather-related, but we don’t rule out anything because we want to know what happened,” Mr Hollande said. “What we know is that the debris is concentrated in a limited space, but it is too soon to draw conclusions.”

The MD-83 aircraft, owned by Swiftair and leased by Algeria’s flagship carrier, disappeared from radar screens less than an hour after it took off early Thursday. The plane had requested permission to change course because of bad weather. The pilots had sent a final message to ask Niger air control to change its route because of heavy rain, Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedraogo said on Thursday.

The MD-83 had passed its annual air navigation certificate renewal inspection in January without any problems, Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said yesterday. The European Aviation Safety Agency also carried out a “ramp inspection”, or unannounced spot check, of the jet last month without incident.

Another ramp inspection was done on the plane in Marseille, France, on July 22 — two days before the plane went down, he added. AP