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Mourning begins for Air France crash victims
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 03 - 06 - 2009


French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his
predecessor, Jacques Chirac, took part Wednesday at a
multi-denominational service at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris
commemorating the 228 victims of Monday's crash of an Air France
jetliner, according to dpa.
Sarkozy was accompanied to the service by his wife, Carla
Bruni-Sarkozy, as well as Prime Minister Francois Fillon. Also
attending were Air France executives and employees as well as
relatives of some of the victims of Monday's accident.
"We pray for the spouses, the parents and children who have lost
their loved ones," said the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Andre
Vingt-Trois at the service. "And also for the personnel of Air
France, who will continue to fly."
For the duration of the service, 228 candles burned before the
cathedral's altar, for each of the victim's of France's worst-ever
air disaster.
There were 72 French nationals, 60 Brazilians and 26 Germans among
the plane's 216 passengers and crew of 12.
The memorial service began as Brazilian air force planes continued
to find pieces of wreckage believed to be from the Airbus A330-200
that crashed into the Atlantic while traveling from Rio de Janeiro to
Paris.
Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral said in Brasilia that among the
10 newly-discovered objects there was a large piece about 7 meters
long.
In addition, oil and petrol traces were discovered along a
20-kilometer swathe of the Atlantic Ocean approximately 1,200
kilometers from the Brazilian coast.
On Tuesday, Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim said there was
"no doubt" that debris found in the area belonged to Air France
flight 447.
A Brazilian ship, the Grajau, has reached the area and will be
seeking to retrieve the debris discovered by the planes, Admiral
Savio Nogueira said. A total of five Brazilian navy ships are on the
way to the area.
Earlier Wednesday, an investigation into the cause of the world's
worst commercial air disaster since 2001 was formally opened.
Officials of France's Office of Accident Investigations and
Analyses (BEA), which is heading the inquiry, said Wednesday that the
search for the cause of the crash would be long and difficult.
"This aviation catastrophe is the worst this country has ever
suffered," BEA director Paul-Louis Arslanian told journalists in
Paris. "We can not allow ourselves to speculate. We must verify
everything."
Arslanian said the accident occurred in the middle of the
Atlantic, where the waters are very deep and the seafloor is very
mountainous. This makes locating the sunken aircraft extremely
difficult.
Arslanian was very clear about the first priority of the
investigation. "We have to find the black boxes," he said.
Each plane carries two black boxes, a flight data recorder and a
cockpit voice recorder, and they are essential in helping
investigators in the painstaking search for the cause of a plane
crash.
"I don't know what we will find. But we will immediately
communicate everything we learn, as soon as it is clear to us,"
Arslanian said.
The BEA said that a first report on its investigation would be
issued at the end of June.
Meanwhile, the search for the fuselage of the aircraft continued.
Captain Christophe Prazuck, of the French army chief of staff, said
that Wednesday would be "a day of transition" in that search.
"We will move from an air operation covering a large zone to a
naval operation over a restricted zone," he was quoted as saying by
the online edition of the daily Le Figaro.
The merchant ships and navy vessels in the area will gather the
debris floating on the surface before submarines are deployed in the
coming weeks to search for the wreckage itself, he said.
In addition, an AWACS surveillance plane will carry out a
"cartography" of the debris in an attempt to determine the precise
place where the aircraft crashed into the sea, to help in the
eventual recovery of the plane's black boxes, Prazuck said.


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