Yahoo – AFP,
July 27, 2014
Bamako (AFP) - The second black box from the Air Algerie plane disaster was recovered Saturday at the remote crash site in northern Mali as investigators headed to the scene to determine the cause of the tragedy.
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| Experts to begin probe into Air Algerie crash (AFP) |
Bamako (AFP) - The second black box from the Air Algerie plane disaster was recovered Saturday at the remote crash site in northern Mali as investigators headed to the scene to determine the cause of the tragedy.
French
President Francois Hollande, who met families of some of the victims in Paris,
said the bodies of all 118 victims of Thursday's accident would be repatriated
to France and a memorial would be erected at the site.
Officials
who had already reached Mali's remote, barren Gossi area described a scene of
devastation littered with twisted and burnt fragments of the plane.
No one
survived the impact and entire families were wiped out. France bore the brunt
of the disaster as 54 of its nationals were killed in the crash of the
McDonnell Douglas 83, which had taken off from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso
bound for Algiers.
Travellers
from Burkina Faso, Lebanon, Algeria, Spain, Canada, Germany and Luxembourg also
died in the crash, increasingly being blamed on bad weather that forced the
pilots to change course.
Hollande
said flags would fly at half-mast from government buildings for three days from
Monday to mourn the victims, and all bodies would be repatriated to France as
soon as was possible.
"A
memorial will be put up so that no one forgets that 118 people perished in this
area," he told reporters.
But the
identification of bodies could be an arduous task given the violent impact of
the crash.
"It is
difficult to retrieve anything, even victims' bodies, because we have only seen
body parts on the ground," said General Gilbert Diendiere, chief of the
military staff of Burkina Faso's presidency.
A member of
a delegation sent to the crash site by President Blaise Compaore, Diendiere
added that "debris was scattered over an area of 500 metres (yards) which
is due to the fact that the plane hit the ground and then probably
rebounded."
Compaore
met on Saturday with relatives of some crash victims in Ouagadougou and
announced that Burkina Faso has opened an official inquiry into the cause of
the disaster.
The
Burkinade prosecutor "will work in close cooperation with his counterparts
from Mali and France," he said.
Experts
from France's Bureau of Investigations and Analyses agency (BEA) which
investigates air accidents were due to fly to the scene by helicopter in the
afternoon, spokeswoman Martine Del Bono said.
Entire
families wiped out
Meanwhile,
the scale of the tragedy for some communities became clear as it emerged that
10 members of one French family died in the crash.
"It's
brutal. It has wiped an entire family from the earth," said Patrice
Dunard, mayor of Gex, where four of the Reynaud family lived.
And the
small town of Menet in central France was left devastated when residents
discovered that a local family of four -- a couple, their 10-year-old daughter
Chloe and their 14-year-old son Elno -- had died.
In Lebanon,
one family in the southern El-Kharayeb village died too -- the third time that
residents there had been involved in a plane disaster.
The
families of some of the victims were being flown Saturday to the crash site
from Ouagadougou. The first helicopter left in the morning and another was due
to follow.
The MD-83
jet was operated by Spanish charter firm Swiftair -- a company with a good
safety record -- on behalf of Air Algerie.
French
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said weather conditions appeared to be the
most likely cause of the accident, the worst air tragedy for French nationals
since the crash of the Air France A330 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in June
2009.
Police
forces, crash experts
The Air
Algerie crash was the third worldwide in the space of just eight days, capping
a disastrous week for the aviation industry.
On July 17,
a Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down in restive eastern Ukraine, killing all
298 people on board.
And a Taiwanese
aircraft crashed in torrential rain in Taiwan on Wednesday, killing 48.
Apart from
the BEA experts, France has also dispatched 20 police forces to try and
identify the victims and determine the cause of the Air Algerie crash.
One of the
flight recorders of the plane was retrieved almost as soon as rescuers arrived
on the spot, while the second black box was found late Saturday, according to
Radhia Acouri, the spokeswoman for the MINUSMA UN stabilisation force in Mali.
France has
also dispatched military forces already stationed in Gao since because of an
offensive it launched in Mali last year to try to rid the north of Islamist
extremists.
This year
has already seen Algeria mourn the loss of more than 70 people in the crash of
a C-130 military aircraft in February.
The north
African country is observing a three-day period of national mourning for the
latest crash.
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