To CNN and all
I'm an airline Captain with hundreds of ITCZ crossings. Believe me, it'll keep you awake.
In darkness with all that lightning going on around them they would've surely have the Weather radar on and noses glued to the windshield to look outside.
Proper use of Weather radar is difficult and needs practice, but, considering the experience of those pilots you can be sure that that was covered.
Looking at the Sat plots of the weather at their datalink message to their maintenance base you can determine they were in the middle of the worst weather on the planet at time of transmission.
No, a lightning strike will NOT bring any plane down. But I have heard of cases where it wrecked the (only) weather radar antenna on board. And that would have been like the worse place and moment to loose that piece of equipment.
Funny, really, if you ask me. With all redundancy on board there's actually only ONE weather radar antenna that shares it's signal with two independent weather radar computers. I've had a case of loosing that single antenna in Take off from MIA in horrendous weather. Luckily for me and my passengers Miami radar gave me precise heading instructions to stay clear of those huge showers. I guess AF447 was not that lucky there....