Airtren,
I agree with your semantics but I think that Af are obfuscating. A clearer statement would be "the pilots were unable to recover from the stall" for whatever reason whether it be lack of training, not realisung they were fully stalled, simple panic or a combination of these and other factors.
"Could not" might imply what I wrote or that given the situation nobody could recover the plane, something that has not even been suggested yet.