It has just been announced that the black boxes from the crashed Air Algerie in Mali last week will be sent to France for further analysis, it was announced by the French Embassy in Mali. The officials are preparing the process of identifying the remains of the people who died in the crash.
The first black box was found on Friday at the crash site and the second one was found by the U.N. peacekeepers on Saturday among the wreckage. The Air Algerie plane was heading from Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou) to Algeria (Algiers) when it crashed near in Mali near the border with the country it was departing from. There were 118 people on the plane and 58 of them were French.
Francois Hollande, the president of France, declared on Saturday a three-day mourning period to commemorate the victims of the crash. He also states that he wants all the remains to be brought to France and he urges the black box analysis to be made as quickly as possible. The MD-83 plane disappeared from the radar less than an hour into the flight.
Didier Nourrison, a spokesperson for the French Embassy in Bamako, declared:
The two black boxes from the plane will be transferred from Gao to Bamako and then the Malian authorities will give them to French gendarmes experts so they can be taken to Paris.
Although the reasons for the crash are not yet determined, French authorities believe that bad weather is to blame for the crash of the plane, but they’re not rushing to dismiss other possibilities, such as terrorism. The fact that Northern Mali is controlled by rebels (including an Islamic extremist group that is linked to the al-Qaida) after in 2012 there was a coup in the region is only adding to the speculations.
To avoid the situation in Ukraine with the corpses being maltreated, the site of the crash is being secured by almost 200 French soldiers and 40 Dutch soldiers from the U.N. mission for peacekeeping and also Malian soldiers. This information was made public by Lt. Col. Michel Sabatier, French army spokesperson.
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