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19 March 2024

Families mourn victims of Air Algerie crash in Mali

Published
By Reuters/AFP

Latest: Family members of those killed on the Air Algerie flight that crashed in Mali were taken to the wreckage to grieve on Saturday as French President Francois Hollande announced three days of mourning.

Hollande ordered that flags on government buildings across France fly at half-mast for three days from Monday after the death of 118 people including 54 French nationals in the crash.

Hollande, who met with relatives of victims for three hours on Saturday afternoon, said that all the bodies would be flown to France and that he would make sure that families can, at some point, travel to the crash site to help them cope with their grief.

"A headstone will be erected so that no one ever forgets that on this land, on this site, 118 people perished," Hollande said in a television address, his third on the air disaster in three days.

Families of victims from Burkina Faso, from where the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 aircraft took off early on Thursday morning, were flown out by helicopter to pay respects at the scrubby bushland site.

But, in a blow to the bereaved, the mayor for the northern Malian town of Gossi, said that the remains would be difficult to recover.

"No bodies cannot be recovered because they are shredded and burned. Everything has burned, even the forest in a radius of 200 metres," said Moussa Ag Almouner.

"It is heart-breaking and difficult for any person to bear. You are left with no appetite. It's better not to go and see," he added, after a visit to the site.

As well as French and Burkinabe, those aboard included Lebanese, Algerians, Spanish, Canadians, Germans, Luxembourgers, a Cameroonian, a Belgian, an Egyptian, a Ukrainian, a Swiss, a Nigerian and a Malian.

Earlier:

Poor weather was the most likely cause of the crash of an Air Algerie flight over the West African state of Mali with 116 people on board, French officials said on Friday.

Investigators at the scene of the crash had concluded the airliner broke apart when it hit the ground, the officials said, suggesting this meant it was unlikely to have been the victim of an attack.

"The aircraft was destroyed at the moment it crashed," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio of the wreckage of the plane carrying 51 French nationals which crashed in Mali near the border with Burkina Faso on Thursday.

"We think the aircraft crashed for reasons linked to the weather conditions. No theory can be excluded at this point ... but that is indeed the most likely theory," he added.

Separately, Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier said the strong smell of aircraft fuel at the crash site and the fact that the debris was scattered over a relatively small area also suggested the cause of the crash was linked to weather, a technical problem or a cumulation of such factors.

"We exclude - and have done so from the start - any ground strike," Cuvillier told France 2 television.

He added that a column of 100 soldiers from the French force stationed in the region were on their way to secure the crash site near the northern town of Gossi. France deployed troops to Mail last year to halt an al Qaeda-backed insurgency.

Aviation officials lost contact with Flight AH5017 en route from Burkina Faso to Algeria early on Thursday after a request by the pilot to change course due to bad weather.

Burkina Faso authorities said the passenger list included 51 French, 27 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, five Canadians, four Germans, two from Luxembourg, one Cameroonian, one Belgian, one Egyptian, one Ukranian, one Swiss, one Nigerian and one Malian. Crash site investigators saw no survivors.

Wreckage of missing Algerian airliner found in Mali

The wreckage of an Air Algerie plane missing since early Thursday with 116 people on board has been found in Mali near the Burkina Faso border, an army coordinator in Burkina Faso and the French presidency said.

"We have found the Algerian plane. The wreck has been located ... 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of the Burkina Faso border" in the Malian region of Gossi, said General Gilbert Diendiere of the Burkina Faso army.

"At the moment we have no further information on (the fate of) the passengers but our teams are hard at work," he said.

Diendiere gave no indication as to what may have caused the plane to crash.

The French president's office said Friday the jet was clearly identified even though it had "disintegrated".

A "French military unit has been sent to (the area) to secure the site and gather evidence", it added in a statement.

President Francois Hollande expressed his solidarity with the families and friends of the victims.

Flight AH5017, which took off from Ouagadougou bound for Algiers with 51 French nationals aboard according to French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, went missing amid reports of heavy storms, company sources and officials said.

The airline said there were also 24 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, six Spanish, five Canadians, four Germans and two Luxembourg nationals on board.

Canadian media said a Canadian family of four were among the victims.

The mother, father and two children lived in a suburb of Montreal and were returning home with a friend - a resident of nearby Sherbrooke, Quebec - from another couple's 50th wedding anniversary celebrations in Burkina Faso, said French-language broadcaster LCN.

An Air Algerie official in Montreal was not able to confirm the reports.

The flight had been presumed lost even before Hollande appeared on TV to announce: "Everything leads us to believe that the plane has crashed."

He said the plane's Spanish crew had signalled they were altering course "due to particularly difficult weather conditions".

Fabius had said earlier that "contact was lost with the McDonnell Douglas 83 at 1:47 (local time), a little after the pilots said they were diverting from the route due to meteorological reasons".

Algerian radio quoted Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal as saying the plane dropped off the radar at Gao, 500 kilometres (about 300 miles) from the Algerian border.

- Poor visibility -
Mali, Algeria, Niger and France coordinated their search efforts under the umbrella of the French-led military intervention in Mali, Operation Serval.

"Even though the aircraft was above Mali it was in airspace managed by the control centre in Niamey in Niger," an air traffic control official told AFP.

Aviation sources told AFP the MD-83 was leased from Spanish company Swiftair.

Its six-member crew were all Spanish, said Spain's airline pilots' union Sepla, and Swiftair confirmed the aircraft went missing less than an hour after take-off.

"The plane was not far from the Algerian frontier when the crew was asked to make a detour because of poor visibility and to prevent the risk of collision with another aircraft on the Algiers-Bamako route," an airline source said.

"Contact was lost after the change of course."

The plane had apparently been given the "all clear" following an inspection in France only this week, French civil aviation authority DGAC said.

In France, two crisis units were set up, one at the DGAC and another at the foreign ministry, in addition to two further centres at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris and at Marseille airport.

DGAC said many passengers had been due to catch onward connecting flights to Paris and Marseille.

One French family had seven people on the plane, a brother of one passenger told AFP.

"There was my brother, his wife and their four children, plus my nephew," Amadou Ouedraogo said via telephone. 

'Emergency plan'

A controller in Mali, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the area was rocked by "strong storms" overnight.

Air Algerie, in a statement carried by national news agency APS, said it had initiated an "emergency plan" in the search for AH5017, which flies the four-hour passenger route four times a week.

In Cuba, the daughter of President Raul Castro assured journalists she was alive and well, contradicting reports that she had been onboard the doomed flight.

Mariela Castro, a sexologist and gay rights activist, said she had been told there was another passenger of the same name aboard flight AH5017.

The crash comes at the end of a disastrous week for the aviation industry.

On July 17, a Malaysia Airlines jet crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

A Taiwanese aircraft crashed in torrential rain in southwest Taiwan on Wednesday, killing 48.

In February, a C-130 military aircraft carrying 78 people in Algeria's mountainous northeast crashed, killing more than 70 people.

The plane had been flying from the desert garrison town of Tamanrasset in Algeria's deep south to Constantine, 320 kilometres east of Algiers.

Tamanrasset was also the site of the country's worst civilian air disaster, in March 2003 that killed all but one of the 103 people onboard an Air Algerie Boeing 737-200.

Air Algerie flight with 110 people has mysteriously crashed

An Air Algerie flight crashed on Thursday en route from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers with 110 passengers on board, an Algerian aviation official said.

There were few clear indications of what might of happened to the aircraft, or whether there were casualties, but Burkino Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said it asked to change route at 0138 GMT because of a storm in the area.

"I can confirm that it has crashed," the Algerian official told Reuters, declining to be identified or give any details about what had happened to the aircraft on its way north.

Almost half of the passengers were French citizens, an airline official said.

Two French fighter jets based in the region have been dispatched to try to locate the airliner along its probable route, a French army spokesman said. Niger security sources said planes were flying over the border region with Mali to search for the flight.

Algeria's state news agency APS said authorities lost contact with flight AH 5017 an hour after it took off from Burkina Faso, but other officials gave differing accounts of the times of contact, adding to confusion about the plane's fate.

Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the plane, confirmed it had lost contact with the MD-83 operated by Air Algerie, which it said was carrying 110 passengers and six crew.

A diplomat in the Malian capital Bamako said that the north of the country - which lies on the plane's likely flight path - was struck by a powerful sandstorm overnight.

Whatever the cause, another plane crash is likely to add to nerves in the industry after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed over Ukraine last week, a TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a thunderstorm on Wednesday.

An Air Algerie representative in Burkina Faso, Kara Terki, told a news conference that all the passengers on the plane were in transit, either for Europe, the Middle East or Canada.

He said the passenger list included 50 French, 24 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two from Luxembourg, one Belgian, one Swiss, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian and one Romanian. Lebanese officials said there were at least 10 Lebanese citizens on the flight.

A spokeswoman for SEPLA, Spain's pilots union, said the six crew were from Spain. She could not give any further details.

REGIONAL SEARCH

Swiftair said on its website the aircraft took off from Burkina Faso at 0117 GMT and was supposed to land in Algiers at 0510 GMT but never reached its destination.

An Algerian aviation official said the last contact Algerian authorities had with the missing Air Algerie aircraft was at 0155 GMT when it was flying over Gao, Mali.

Aviation authorities in Burkina say they handed the flight to the control tower in Niamey, Niger, at 1:38 a.m. (0138 GMT). They said the last contact with the flight was just after 4:30 a.m. (0330 GMT).

Burkina Faso minister Ouedrago said the flight asked the control tower in Niamey to change route at 0138 GMT because of a storm in the Sahara.

However, a source in the control tower in Niamey, who declined to be identified, said it had not been contacted by the plane, which in theory should have flown over Mali.

Burkinabe authorities have set up a crisis unit in Ouagadougou airport to provide information to families.

Issa Saly Maiga, head of Mali's National Civil Aviation Agency, said that a search was under way for the missing flight.

"We do not know if the plane is Malian territory," he told Reuters. "Aviation authorities are mobilised in all the countries concerned - Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Algeria and even Spain."

Aviation websites said the missing aircraft, one of four MD-83s owned by Swiftair, was 18-years-old. The aircraft's two engines are made by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies.

US planemaker McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing , stopped producing the MD-80 airliner family in 1999 but it remains in widespread use. According to British consultancy Flightglobal Ascend, there are 482 MD-80 aircraft in operation, many of them in the United States.

"Boeing is aware of the report (on the missing aircraft). We are awaiting additional information," a spokesman for the planemaker said.

Swiftair has a relatively clean safety record, with five accidents since 1977, two of which caused a total of eight deaths, according to the Washington-based Flight Safety Foundation.

Air Algerie's last major accident was in 2003 when one of its planes crashed shortly after take-off from the southern city of Tamanrasset, killing 102 people. In February this year, 77 people died when an Algerian military transport plane crashed into a mountain in eastern Algeria.