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«On Saturday night, a Royal Air Maroc (RAM) plane linking Brazzaville to Casablanca was forced to urgently return to May Maya airport after a reactor has caught fire», Guinean newspaper Libre Opinion reported on Monday.
Locals «said they heard a loud bang while others saw how the burning aircraft flew over the city», media reports said.
The information went viral, relayed by news platforms in Morocco, first by le1.ma and LeDesk, and then by bladi.net. In addition to Libre Opinion Guinea, le1.ma quotes another newspaper called BrazzaNews, a Congolese news site.
It is the Facebook page of this platform that seems to be among the first sites to report on the alleged incident on Sunday. Other platforms in Africa have relayed the same news, such as the Regional Press Agency (APR News) or BF226 TV.
The latter features the account of an «eyewitness» who feared a plane crash in the area closest to the airport. It is the same story relayed by le1.ma. The Moroccan media quotes «Congolese media», indicating that «the passengers who are accommodated in different hotels in Brazzaville will leave on Monday via another regular RAM flight for Casablanca». LeDesk, for its part, relayed the same information last night, quoting the Congolese media, but adding that RAM «did not comment on the incident».
Images taken in 2013 in Montreal
However, the photos used by several sites are not those of the incident which would have occurred in Brazzaville. Indeed, they date from November 2013 and show the extent of a fire started at the level of a handler, parked next to a RAM plane which connects Casablanca to Montreal.
The incident had been widely reported at the time by several Moroccan newspapers, including Yabiladi, on the basis of an airline press release, issued by the plane’s crew from Montreal's Pierre-Elliott Trudeau International Airport.
Contacted on Tuesday morning by Yabiladi, a source at Royal Air Maroc denied what has been reported. «If a RAM crash really took place, in the words chosen by some media, it would have been relayed very quickly around the world». According to our source, it is not an engine fire either.
«After takeoff, the dashboard notified the captain of a technical problem. This is why it was decided to turn around to evacuate the passengers safely. They were taken over by the company overnight, time to find another plane», the sam source concluded.
