I am seeing a pattern here. Three major aviation disasters (AF, Mali, this one) involving western pilots trying to tangle with heavy tropical thunderstorms. Is it possible that better education on tropical weather might prevent this toll from increasing? Those of us who are used to the weather in the temperate zones are also used to seeing severe storms moving east. Tropical severe storms move west. Their dynamics are similar but everything about them moves opposite to what we are used to seeing.
I wonder if this basic fact underlies the tragic end results of these three confrontations of aircraft and severe tropical thunderstorms.
Pre-flight planning of avoidance should stress the fact that tropical cells move west and planning a slight deviation west as you might do with storms further away from the equator is the wrong way to proceed. You would do better to be thinking of avoidance to the east in low latitudes.