PARIS, France (AFP) — France said yesterday the pilots of the Air Algerie passenger plane that crashed in Mali, killing all 118 people on board, had asked to turn back, in a new development to a complex probe into the tragedy.

“What we know for sure is that the weather was bad that night, that the plane crew had asked to change route then to turn back before all contact was lost,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters in his latest briefing about last week’s disaster.

Speaking hours after the black box flight recorders of the McDonnell Douglas 83 jet arrived in Paris from Mali to help investigators, Fabius said air crash experts currently on the remote desert site of the accident were working in “extremely difficult conditions”.

More than 20 French experts from the country’s Bureau of Investigations and Analyses (BEA), which probes air accidents, as well as specialist police forces were on site in Mali’s barren Gossi area where the plane came down, he said.

Experts from Mali, Algeria and Spain were also helping to determine why the plane, which was operated by Spanish charter firm Swiftair on behalf of Air Algerie, came down with such force that it completely disintegrated.

Investigators from the United States were also due to join them, Fabius added, as McDonnell Douglas belongs to US aviation giant Boeing.

The BEA announced that it had already extracted basic data from one black box, including the speed, altitude and trajectory of the plane, without detailing them.

“Decoding and detailed analysis of this data will now start with members of the Malian probe commission,” the bureau said, adding that the head of this commission would announce any future results.

But the BEA said it was still busy recovering cockpit conversations from the other flight recorder, which had been damaged by the impact.

The bureau has faced this type of challenge before, such as in the 2009 crash of the Yemenia flight in the Comoros, when investigators took two weeks to extract data.

The accident was the third crash worldwide in the space of just eight days, capping a disastrous week for the aviation industry.

On July 17, a Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down in restive eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

And a Taiwanese aircraft crashed in torrential rain in Taiwan on Wednesday, killing 48.

Apart from air accident experts, France has also dispatched military forces already stationed in Mali since its offensive last year to free the country’s north from the grip of Islamists and Tuareg rebels.

Fabius said that by Monday evening, a total of 200 French forces were due to have arrived on the crash site, as well as Malian soldiers and Dutch forces from the MINUSMA UN stabilisation force in Mali.

“The site has been secured,” he said.