Photographs of the crash scene at Gossi near the Malian border with Burkina Faso showed small pieces of the aircraft scattered over a relatively small area of African desert.
The final death toll for Flight 5017, which plunged from the sky less than 50 minutes after taking off early Thursday from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, stood at 118. The victims included the plane's six Spanish crew members.
Humanitarian workers, tourists and European expatriates were among those who died. Fifty-four of the passengers were French, including 10 people from the same family, and French President Francois Hollande described it as a tragedy for the “whole French nation … and others.”
“There are, sadly, no survivors,” he told journalists Friday morning. “Our thoughts are with the victims, their families and friends. We stand by their side.”
French television station France 2 aired video of the crash scene from above that showed a blackened crater in the sand. Debris suggested the plane hit the ground at a high speed and shattered.
Witnesses said there were “no seats, no luggage, no trace of human beings,” describing the plane as “pulverized.”
Among the dead were three generations of the Reynaud family from the Rhone Alpes region of France. Michel Reynaud, his former wife, their two sons and two daughters-in-law as well as four grandchildren were returning from Burkina Faso after attending a family wedding.
“It's a tragedy, it was the holiday of a lifetime for them,” a grieving friend told the French newspaper Le Dauphine Libere.
Soon after a French military drone identified the crash site at Gossi early Friday morning, French soldier, in Mali to fight Islamic militants, secured the area with the help of Malian troops.
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