Year after year, from each side of the Mediterranean, in Nice and Ajaccio, commemorations of the caravel crash follow one another. After President Emmanuel Macron’s request for a lifting of defense secrecy in 2019, families hope to have their questions answered. Answers that could come from army archive boxes. They could shed light on the gloomy questions rehashed for so many years, since the air disaster of the caravel on September 11, 1968 off the coast of Cap d’Antibes.
The hypothesis that a French army missile was responsible for the crash is a possibility that families do not want to rule out. This year, a detail makes the commemoration a special edition.
The President’s Flowers and Unanswered Questions
Among the official wreaths of flowers, placed in front of the memorial stele in Nice, we find the bouquets from Corsica or offered by Air France, the City of Nice or the Departmental Council of the Alpes-Maritimes. One of the bouquets comes for the first time in Nice from the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron. Mathieu Paoli, of the association of families of victims, appreciates the gesture but he does not budge : “The wreath of the President of the Republic is a strong gesture, despite having never been received by him. He talks about declassification, but we would like to see the documents.
The president’s decision had given him hope, but he is still waiting: “We are still in the same configuration. We have nothing concrete. So what we want now, of course, is that we know a little more so that finally families, before they leave this world, can really know what really happened. “
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