French soldiers find black box at Air Algerie crash site

France says its investigator will reach the site on Saturday and raises the death toll of its citizens to 54 of the 118 on board who all perished.

A photo released by the French army shows soldiers guarding the crash site of the Air Algerie flight that disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from the Burkina Faso capital Ougadougou on JuShow more

PARIS // French soldiers on Friday recovered a black box from the wreckage of the Air Algerie flight that was discovered in a desolate region of restive northern Mali.

Terrorism has not been ruled out as a cause, although officials say the most likely reason for the catastrophe that killed all 118 people on board is bad weather.

The Air Algerie flight disappeared from radar early on Thursday about 50 minutes after taking off from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, en route to Algiers.

More than 200 troops are guarding the site before French accident and criminal investigators arrive in the area on Saturday, the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said.

The debris is concentrated in an area in the Gossi region of Mali near the border with Burkina Faso “in a zone of savannah and sand with very difficult access, especially in this rainy season,” Mr Fabius said at a news conference in Paris with the defense and transport ministers.

French officials, including the President Francois Hollande and Mr Fabius, increased the death toll to 118, and raising the number of French killed to 54 from 51.

Air Algerie and private Spanish airline Swiftair, which was operating Flight 5017, said on Thursday that there were 116 people onboard.

“We think the plane went down due to weather conditions, but no hypothesis can be excluded as long as we don’t have the results of an investigation,” the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, told RTL radio hours before the news conference with three other government ministers.

The pilots of the MD-83 had sent a final message to ask Niger air control to change its route because of heavy rain, Burkina Faso’s transport minister said on Thursday.

One of two black boxes has been found and was sent to Gao in northern Mali, where remains will be sent for identification before being repatriated, Mr Fabius said on Friday.

The Gossi region where the accident occurred, near the Burkina Faso border, is 160 kilometers south of Gao, where a French contingent of troops is based.

French television showed images of the wreckage site taken by a soldier from Burkina Faso. The brief footage showed a desolate area with scattered debris that was unrecognisable. There were bits of twisted metal but no identifiable parts such as the fuselage or tail, or victims’ bodies.

A French Reaper drone based in Niger spotted the wreckage after getting alerts from Burkina Faso and Malian soldiers, the French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said.

Burkina Faso soldiers were reportedly the first to reach the site. The country’s prime minister, Luc Adolphe Tiao, reviewed videos of the wreckage site and said identifying the victims will be challenging.

“It will be difficult to reconstitute the bodies of the victims,” Tiao said at a news conference. “The human remains are so scattered.”

Mr Hollande has said that France would spare no efforts to uncover why the plane went down – the third major plane disaster around the world within a week. A Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down last week over war-torn eastern Ukraine. The US has blamed it on separatists firing a surface-to-air missile. On Wednesday, a Taiwanese plane crashed during a storm, killing 48 people.

“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.”

Mr Cazeneuve also said on RTL radio: “Terrorist groups are in the zone ... We know these groups are hostile to western interests.”

The MD-83 had passed its annual air navigation certificate renewal inspection in January without any problems, the Spanish deputy prime minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said on Friday. The European Aviation Safety Agency also carried out a “ramp inspection” – or unannounced spot check – of the plane in June without incident.

* Associated Press