PARIS (AP) — Aviation experts, criminal investigators and
soldiers began converging Friday on an isolated patch of restive Mali
to search for clues that might explain why an Air Algerie jetliner fell
from the sky in a storm and apparently disintegrated on impact.
French
authorities said the catastrophe was probably the result of extreme bad
weather, but they refused to exclude other possibilities, like
terrorism, without a full investigation. All 118 people aboard the plane
were killed.
The loss of flight 5017 wiped out whole families.
Nearly half of the dead were French. The passenger list also included
other Europeans, Canadians and Africans. The six crew members were
Spanish.
One man pleaded with French officials not to hold back
any information about the crash that killed his brother and other family
members.
"Tell us. Especially give us an explanation," Amadou Ouedraogo asked on BFM-TV.
French authorities planned to meet Saturday with victims’ families.
The
MD-83 was flying from Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, to Algiers,
Algeria, when it disappeared early Thursday just 50 minutes after
takeoff — the third crash of a passenger plane in the last week.
More
than 200 French, Malian and Dutch troops from the United Nations force
in Mali secured the site ahead of the arrival this weekend of aviation
and criminal investigators.
France has opened a manslaughter investigation because of the 54 French victims.
One
of plane’s two black boxes was found Friday and sent to Gao, the
northern Mali city where a contingent of French troops is based.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said victims’ remains would be sent to Gao for identification
before being returned home.
Difficult access to the area and instability could hinder the investigation.
Gao
is in the heart of a still-restive desert and mountain area in northern
Mali that fell under the control of Tuareg separatists, then al-Qaida
linked Islamist extremists after a 2012 military coup.
French
forces intervened in the west African country in January 2013 to rout
Islamist extremists controlling the region. A French soldier was killed
earlier this month in the Gao region.
The debris field to the
south is in a concentrated area in the Gossi region near the border with
Burkina Faso. The area is "in a zone of savannah and sand with very
difficult access, especially in this rainy season," Fabius said at a
presentation with the defense and transport ministers.
Traveling
by road from the debris field to Gossi would take six hours, he said,
stressing that the field investigation could take time.
Col.
Patrick Tourron of the French Gendarmerie’s victim-identification unit
told BFM-TV that fingerprints, DNA and teeth would provide the primary
clues to each victim’s identity. Surviving family members were to be
asked for victims’ toothbrushes and the names of their dentists, he
said.
Video of the wreckage site taken by a soldier from Burkina
Faso, the nation first on the scene, showed unrecognizable debris
scattered over a desolate area dotted with scrubby vegetation. There
were bits of twisted metal but no identifiable parts such as the
fuselage or tail, or victims’ bodies. An aerial view shown later on
French television revealed similar devastation.
Investigators from Mali, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Spain were joining the inquiry, the French foreign
minister said.
It’s too early to know "with absolute certitude" what caused the disaster, Fabius said, but he
noted major storms in the region.
The
pilot of the jet had advised controllers in Niger that he needed to
change routes because of a storm, Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean
Bertin Ouedraogo said Thursday. Contact with the plane was then lost.
A
French Reaper drone based in neighboring Niger spotted the wreckage
after getting alerts from Burkina Faso and Malian soldiers, Defense
Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told reporters.
"There are hypotheses,
notably weather-related, but we don’t rule out anything because we want
to know what happened," French President Francois Hollande said Friday
after a crisis meeting.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve
reiterated the same message: "We think the plane went down due to
weather conditions." But, speaking on RTL radio, he added: "Terrorist
groups are in the zone. … We know these groups are hostile to Western
interests."
The jet, owned by the Spanish airline Swiftair, had
passed its annual air navigation certificate inspection in January
without any problems, Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de
Santamaria said Friday. The European Aviation Safety Agency also carried
out a "ramp inspection" — or unannounced spot check — of the plane in
June.
Santamaria said another ramp inspection was done in Marseille, France, on July 22 — two days before the
plane went down.
Ramp
inspections "are limited to on-the-spot assessments and cannot
substitute for proper regulatory oversight," the EASA website says.
"Ramp inspections serve as pointers, but they cannot guarantee the
airworthiness of a particular aircraft."
A Malaysia Airlines
flight was shot down last week 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.
___
Associated
Press writers Ciaran Giles in Madrid, Spain, and Brahima Ouedraogo in
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, contributed to this report.