NYT
Speaking on the French radio station RTL, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Wednesday that terrorism was “not a privileged hypothesis at the moment,” but that no theories had been definitively excluded. Mr. Cazeneuve said the size of the area over which debris was scattered suggested that the aircraft had not exploded in the air but rather had disintegrated on impact.
He said that the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, the first black box that was recovered, was damaged, but that investigators expected to be able to recover the conversations stored on its memory chip.
But as of early afternoon, a senior official involved in the investigation said analysts had so far been unsuccessful in retrieving any information from the cockpit voice recorder.