A Paris court has convicted the Spanish airline Swiftair of involuntary manslaughter over the 2014 crash of Air Algérie flight AH5017 in northern Mali, imposing a €225,000 fine described as the maximum penalty.
The verdict came more than 12 years after the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 crashed on 24 July 2014. The aircraft was owned by Swiftair and leased to Air Algérie with its crew. It had been travelling from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, to Algiers, Algeria's main airport.
All 116 people on board were killed. They included 54 French citizens, 23 Burkinabè nationals, Lebanese and Algerian passengers, and six Spanish crew members.
The court heard a case centred on the aircraft's anti-icing system. Investigators found that the system had not been activated while the aircraft was flying through a storm in the Sahel region, south of the Sahara Desert.
Ice crystals then formed on pressure sensors, investigators found. That led to an automatic reduction in engine power and the crash.
The court said shortcomings in Swiftair's training had “certainly contributed to the accident”. The brief does not set out further details of the training failures identified by the court.
The trial began in Paris in March, more than 12 years after the disaster. For relatives, the ruling marked the end of a long wait for a decision in the French proceedings.
Sandrine Tricot, whose husband Frederic Tricot died in the crash, said she had been waiting 4,449 days for a verdict. Nathalie Police lost her 65-year-old father Didier and her 18-year-old half-brother Nicolas.
The French court's decision differs from the earlier outcome in Spain, where prosecutors closed their own investigation without bringing charges. Swiftair rejected the French investigation during the case, calling it “a botched job”.
The €225,000 penalty converts to $256,000 or £193,000.
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