Black box found at Mali crash

French troops guard wreckage; death toll revised to 118

French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian addresses reporters during a press conference held at the foreign ministry in Paris, Friday July 25, 2014 after a plane crashed in Mali. At least 116 people were killed in Thursdays disaster, nearly half of whom were French. One of two black boxes was recovered from the wreckage in the Gossi region of Mali near the border with Burkina Faso, and was taken to the northern city of Gao, where a French contingent is based. The drawing projected at right shows the means used for the searches by French Army. (AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere)
French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian addresses reporters during a press conference held at the foreign ministry in Paris, Friday July 25, 2014 after a plane crashed in Mali. At least 116 people were killed in Thursdays disaster, nearly half of whom were French. One of two black boxes was recovered from the wreckage in the Gossi region of Mali near the border with Burkina Faso, and was taken to the northern city of Gao, where a French contingent is based. The drawing projected at right shows the means used for the searches by French Army. (AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere)

PARIS -- French soldiers recovered a flight recorder Friday that they hope will help them determine the cause of the crash of an Air Algerie plane in a desolate region of restive northern Mali, officials said.

Terrorism hasn't been ruled out as a cause, although officials said the most likely reason for the catastrophe that killed all 118 people onboard is bad weather.

More than 200 troops were guarding the site until French accident and criminal investigators can arrive today, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

The debris field is in the Gossi region of the northwestern African country near the border with Burkina Faso. It is "in a zone of savanna and sand with very difficult access, especially in this rainy season," Fabius said at a news conference in Paris with his defense and transport ministers.

French government officials revised the death toll Friday to 118 and raised the number of French killed to 54 from 51.

Air Algerie and private Spanish airline Swiftair, which was operating Flight 5017, said Thursday there were 116 people onboard. The French officials didn't explain the reason for the changes.

"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," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio hours before the news conference with three other government ministers.

The pilots of the MD-83 plane, which was traveling from Burkina Faso to Algeria, had sent a final message to ask Niger air control to change its route because of heavy rain, Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedraogo said Thursday.

One of the plane's two flight recorders, also known as a black box, has been found and was sent to Gao in northern Mali, where remains will be sent for identification before being repatriated, Fabius said Friday.

The Gossi region where the accident occurred, near the Burkina Faso border, is 100 miles south of Gao.

A French contingent of troops is based in Gao, a government-controlled town.

The vast deserts and mountains of northern Mali fell under control of ethnic Tuareg separatists and then al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremists after a military coup in 2012.

French forces intervened in January 2013 to rout Islamist extremists controlling the region.

The intervention scattered the extremists, but the Tuaregs have pushed back against the authority of the Bamako-based government. Meanwhile, the threat from Islamic militants hasn't disappeared, and France is giving its troops a new and larger anti-terrorist mission across the region.

The plane was found late Thursday when a French Reaper drone based in Niger spotted the wreckage after getting alerts from Burkina Faso and Malian soldiers, Defense 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. "The human remains are so scattered."

French President Francois Hollande has said France will spare no efforts to uncover why the plane went down -- the third major passenger plane disaster around the world within a week. A Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down last week over war-torn eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. On Wednesday, a Taiwanese plane crashed during a storm, killing 48.

"There are hypotheses, notably weather-related, but we don't rule out anything, because we want to know what happened," Hollande said. "What we know is that the debris is concentrated in a limited space, but it is too soon to draw conclusions."

Cazeneuve also said on RTL radio: "Terrorist groups are in the zone. ... We know these groups are hostile to Western interests."

The plane, owned by Swiftair and leased by Algeria's flagship carrier, disappeared from radar screens less than an hour after it took off early Thursday from Ouagadougou for Algiers.

The MD-83 had passed its annual air navigation certificate renewal 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 without incident.

Santamaria also said a ramp inspection was done on the plane in Marseille, France, on Tuesday -- two days before the plane went down.

Ramp inspections "are limited to on-the-spot assessments and cannot substitute for proper regulatory oversight," the agency website says. "Ramp inspections serve as pointers, but they cannot guarantee the airworthiness of a particular aircraft."

Information for this article was contributed by Ciaran Giles and Brahima Ouedraogo of The Associated Press.

A Section on 07/26/2014

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