The crash caused a shock in France. In 2016, an EgyptAir airline plane crashed in the Mediterranean Sea between Crete and the northern coast of Egypt. The 66 people on board, including 40 Egyptians and 15 French, had perished. Seven years later, the victims’ families told AFP on Thursday that there had been “failures at all levels” within the airline. The civil parties spoke at the end of an information meeting lasting approximately five hours at the Paris judicial court, in the presence of investigating magistrates and investigators.
“At all levels, the failure of maintenance and the systematic ignoring of alarms, such as the absence of a smoking ban, demonstrate EgyptAir’s overwhelming responsibility,” Antoine Lachenaud, lawyer for EgyptAir, told AFP. the family of Clément Daeschner Cormary, who died in the crash.
“Experts are unanimous on the fact that there were a huge number of errors, from the flight crew but also from those in maintenance. There was a very significant laxity,” said Julie Heslouin, vice-president of the association of families of victims of flight MS 804. The civil parties hope that EgyptAir and certain Egyptian personnel will be blamed. .
Lack of cooperation from Egypt
The judges exposed their “difficulties” in this investigation “in the face of the lack of cooperation from Egypt”, added Me Sébastien Busy, lawyer for most of the victims’ families and the National Federation of Victims of Attacks and collective accidents (Fenvac). “The victims’ families are outraged, disgusted by Egypt’s institutional obstruction” and “will do everything possible to get to the truth,” he warns.
The families were “very distressed”, according to Me Lachenaud, by listening on Thursday morning to the last seven minutes of recording from the cockpit before the electrical system stopped working. This listening was “very painful, but necessary” and was done at the request of the civil parties, added Julie Heslouin.
False lead of the attack
In this case fraught with human but also diplomatic issues, Cairo claimed in December 2016 to have discovered traces of explosives on the remains of victims. According to a source close to the matter present at the meeting on Thursday, investigators from the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie (IRCGN) who inspected the debris in 2018 found traces of TNT incompatible with lasting immersion in water , rather reminiscent of a later addition. According to this source, this could be akin to manipulation to support the theory of the explosive attack.
Paris doubts this thesis, especially since no organization had claimed responsibility for an attack, and favors the possibility of a technical incident. According to French experts, the fire was started by an avoidable oxygen leak and a crew with “unprofessional” behavior. According to Julie Heslouin, the judges are awaiting a response from Egypt by mid-January to a request for mutual legal assistance aimed at traveling there for several hearings and obtaining a key document.