The former boss of the Egyptian company Flash Airlines was indicted in December by a Paris examining magistrate for “manslaughter” in the investigation into the crash of a Boeing 737 off the coast of
Sharm el-Sheikh (Egypt) in 2004, said a judicial source on Tuesday,
confirming information from Parisian.
This is the first indictment in this case, 18 years after this tragedy which killed 148 people, including 134 French.
A dismissal in 2017
Mohamed Nour, legal representative of this low-cost company, since liquidated, which for a long time had not responded to summons from French justice, had been placed under the status of assisted witness in September. But the magistrate finally decided to indict him on December 16 by mail, according to a source close to the file confirmed by the judicial source.
His lawyer was unreachable mid-afternoon Tuesday to comment on this information. On January 3, 2004, the Flash Airlines plane crashed in the Red Sea three minutes after taking off from the resort, killing its 148 passengers and crew. The judicial investigation, opened in Bobigny on the very day of the tragedy, ended in a dismissal in 2017.
A judge who is “not afraid to go ahead”
But, seized by the families of victims, the Paris Court of Appeal had ordered in September 2019 the resumption of the investigations, judging “insufficient” the attempts carried out during the investigation to collect the explanations of the former president of the Flash Airlines Board of Directors.
She then returned the 37 volumes of this procedure to the hands, this time, of a judge from the collective accidents division of the Paris court so that he tries to collect the explanations of this leader and examine his possible responsibilities in the disaster. “In 18 years of proceedings, we have often asked that justice take an interest in the responsibilities of the company,” observed Isabelle Manson, president of the association for the defense of the families of victims, stressing that the judge now in charge of investigations no was “not afraid to go ahead”.