A river trial and some 560 civil parties, relatives of victims, who will experience a second mourning. Thirteen years after the crash in the open sea of the Yemenia Airlines flight which was to reach the Comoros and in which 152 people, including 66 French, died, the criminal hearing which will have to determine the responsibilities opened on Monday in Paris. Debates scheduled to last a month and which are also broadcast in Marseille, sometimes described as the second capital of the Comoros. Nearly 80,000 people from this archipelago in the Indian Ocean, located 500 kilometers northwest of Madagascar and with one million inhabitants, have settled there.
Like Marie, who lost her mother and little brother in this tragic accident. She came with her two daughters and her sister to attend the opening of the trial. “We want the end of this story to start to really mourn,” explains the one who initiated one of the two associations to help the victims of this plane crash. In the great hall of the Muy barracks, put into service on the occasion of the trial of the Guedj dentists, not many of them made the trip on Monday.
“It’s too emotional”
First, seven, then eleven and finally thirteen civil parties came to listen to the proceedings. Many Comorian Marseillais went to Paris for the first days of the trial, a bus even left Marseille yesterday. But not everyone could, like Fatima, for whom “it is a very good thing that they are broadcasting this trial”.
The fact remains that they listen carefully to the reading of the summary of the investigation, which is rather overwhelming for the company, no representative of which has traveled from Yemen, a country at war since 2014. For Marie, her guilt does not matter. no doubt. “That’s why the trial took so long to take place,” she believes. “If he had nothing to reproach himself with, it would have been quickly settled”.
Nakyssa was 12 on that fateful June 29, 2009, the day she lost her uncle and her grandmother. “It took me a long time to realize what really happened, like two or three years,” says the young woman who waits in the shade of a plane tree. “Now I hope they will accept their wrongs”. In the flat television screens broadcasting live images from the Partis courthouse, the president of the court recites for long minutes the long list of the names of the dead in this crash. “It’s going to be hard,” sighs Fatima. “It’s going to be complicated, we can already feel it,” whispers Marie. “We will have to endure”.
An old man declines the interview request. “No, it’s too much emotion when I talk about it,” he apologizes in kandou and kofia, the traditional Comorian tunic and hat. On the benches, the civil parties present in Marseille have regrouped. A way of trying to unite, although the different families who follow the debates that day do not know each other. Or rather not yet. The trial will last until June 2. This should allow time for those present to meet there.