January 17, 2024.   Desert Desecration.

In a post from a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the fascinating memorial erected in the Sahara Desert honoring the victims of UTA flight 772, which was bombed in 1989. It was constructed in 2007 in the spot where the plane fell, in the Tenere region of central Niger, paid for using some of the $170 million compensation provided by the Libyan government, which carried out the bombing.

Any number of crash memorials are scattered around the world, and this is maybe the most haunting and evocative of them all. It was built using desert stones, mirrors, and pieces of the wreckage itself, backdropped by one of the most remote and inhospitable landscapes on earth.

It forms a compass rose, with the silhouette of a jet traveling northwesterly — the direction the DC-10 was headed, en route to Paris, when a luggage bomb destroyed it.

Well, I just learned from a reader that the monument was recently vandalized and badly damaged. Nobody knows for sure who did it, but it’s likely the incident is related to last summer’s coup in Niger and the anti-French sentiments percolating within the country.

This is sad to say the least. Desecrating a memorial to the victims of mass murder seems in especially bad taste, and many of flight 772’s passengers were African, not French.

Screen grab from Google Earth