A Royal Air Force (FRA) Puma-type helicopter carrying eleven people on board crashed at sea off Sidi Ifni, leaving nine dead and two seriously injured. Eight of the victims died instantly and a ninth succumbed to his injuries upon his transfer to the Guelmim hospital.

The crash reportedly occurred during military training manoeuvres that the Royal Army customarily carried out in this region. All the victims are military personnel except for one of them, a member of the Royal Gendarmerie, who had been newly assigned there.

In this highly militarised region, accidents of this kind are frequent. Already last April, during joint manoeuvres between the US Navy and the Royal Armed Forces, two American soldiers died during the crash of their helicopter upon take-off from Cap Draa. Three other US soldiers were injured during this tragedy.

Even more dramatic in this region, a military plane (C130 H) providing connections between Agadir, Laâyoune and Dakhla, with nine crew members on board, and sixty military passengers as well as twelve civilian people, had never reached its destination, crashing about ten kilometres from the landing strip at the FAR base in Guelmim. The crash was then attributed to poor weather conditions and mainly to the thick fog that covered the region.

For nearly three years, our Army has experienced various mishaps of the kind, more or less dramatic. In January 2010 in Meknès, a senior officer succumbed during the crash of the F5 he was piloting. A month earlier, five members of the Gendarmerie perished when the helicopter belonging to their corps crashed, and the list is long. It is useless here to relate all these tragedies through the various crashes of military aircraft that have occurred here and there, but we will nevertheless regret the eternal refrain of: "An investigation is underway to determine the causes...". It would have been better for our "grande muette" (the military) to depart somewhat from this label and to distil some information to us. As much as the victims were military, they were above all our fellow citizens. Since Wednesday when this tragedy occurred, no statement has come to support it.