This photo provided on Friday, July 25, 2014, by the Burkina Faso Military shows a man at the site of the plane crash in Mali.PARIS – Aviation experts, criminal investigators and soldiers began converging Friday on an isolated patch of restive Mali to search for clues that might explain why an Air Algerie jetliner fell from the sky in a storm and apparently disintegrated on impact.
French authorities said the catastrophe was probably the result of extreme bad weather, but they refused to exclude other possibilities, like terrorism, without a full investigation. All 118 people aboard the plane were killed.
The loss of flight 5017 wiped out whole families. Nearly half of the dead were French. The passenger list also included other Europeans, Canadians and Africans. The six crew members were Spanish.
One man pleaded with French officials not to hold back any information about the crash that killed his brother and other family members.
“Tell us. Especially give us an explanation,” Amadou Ouedraogo asked on BFM-TV.