16°51′55″N 11°57′10″E

Copy/paste that into Google Earth or Google Maps and go there and you will see it is the middle of the Sahara desert and nothing good can be there. Still, there are photos that people took of the place and pinned. It is the desolate place where the crew and passengers of  UTA Flight 772 bit it, and there is a memorial to that catastrophe at the site now.

The middle of nowhere. In the brown part.

Almost to the ground, still nothing.

And then suddenly:

Two photographs show up pinned there at the place, of the same upright memorial. Sad.

Noticed on Paul Clammer's Twitter feed pointing to viralnova.com where the full story is researched and spread out in compelling array. They used Google Maps, I used Google Earth.

The plane was bombed.

Motive: revenge against the French for supporting Chad against the expansionist projects of Libya toward Chad. Libya was understood to have considered this French support as "neo-colonialist" per wikipedia, much of the information cited on viralnova is through wikipedia.