PARIS (AP) — French soldiers on Friday secured one of the black boxes from the Air Algerie plane that
went down in restive northern Mali with the loss of at least 116 people, French President Francois
Hollande said Friday. Terrorism has not been ruled out as a cause, although officials say the most
likely cause is bad weather.
The black box was recovered from the wreckage, in the Gossi region near the border with Burkina Faso, and
is being taken to the northern city of Gao, where a French contingent is based, Hollande told reporters
after a crisis meeting with top ministers.
“There are, alas, no survivors,” Hollande said. “I share the pain of families living through this
terrible ordeal.”
Nearly half of the passengers aboard the flight were French, many headed on to Europe after arriving in
the Algerian capital from the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou.
The president has said that France will spare no efforts to uncover the cause of the crash — the third
major plane disaster around the world within a week.
“There are hypotheses, notably weather-related, but we don’t rule out anything because we want to know
what happened,” Hollande said.
“What we know is that the debris is concentrated in a limited space, but it is too soon to draw
conclusions,” he added.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve added, speaking to RTL radio: “Terrorist groups are in the zone. …
We know these groups are hostile to Western interests.”
The MD-83 aircraft, owned by Spanish company Swiftair and leased by Algeria’s flagship carrier,
disappeared from radar less than an hour after it took off early Thursday from Ouagadougou for Algiers.
The plane had requested permission to change course due to bad weather.
A team from France’s Accident Investigation Bureau has been sent to Mali, Hollande said.
A French Reaper drone based in Niger initially spotted the wreckage, French Transport Minister Frederic
Cuvillier told France-Info radio on Friday. Two helicopter teams also overflew, noting that the wreckage
was in a concentrated area. A column of soldiers in some 30 vehicles were dispatched to the site, he
said.
“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,” said Gen. Gilbert Diendere, a close aide to Burkina
Faso President Blaise Compaore and head of the crisis committee set up to investigate the flight.
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 Thursday.
The vast deserts and mountains of northern Mali fell under control of ethnic Tuareg separatists and then
al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremists after a military coup in 2012.
French forces intervened in January 2013 to rout Islamist extremists controlling the region. A French
soldier was killed earlier this month near the major town of Gao, where French troops remain.
The intervention scattered the extremists, but the Tuaregs have pushed back against the authority of the
Bamako-based government. Meanwhile, the threat from Islamic militants hasn’t disappeared, and France is
giving its troops a new and larger anti-terrorist mission across the region.
The crash was the third airline disaster within a week.
Last week, a Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over war-torn eastern Ukraine; the U.S. has blamed it
on separatists firing a surface-to-air missile. On Wednesday, a Taiwanese plane crashed during a storm,
killing 48 people.