UTA Flight 772 was a scheduled international passenger flight of the French airline Union de Transports Aériens (UTA) operating from Brazzaville in the People's Republic of the Congo, via N'Djamena in Chad, to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France on 19 September 1989, which crashed into the Ténéré desert near Bilma, Niger, killing all 170 people on board after an in-flight explosion caused by a suitcase bomb.

Forty-six minutes later, at its cruising altitude of 35,100 feet (10,700 m), a suitcase bomb exploded in the cargo hold, causing UTA Flight 772 to break up over the Sahara 450 kilometres (280 mi; 240 nmi) east of Agadez in the southern Ténéré and to the north of the Termit Massif in the Zinder Region of Niger.

[6] Eight of the fatalities were oil workers (from Esso, Parker, and Schlumberger) returning following the completion of drilling of the Kome-3 borehole in southern Chad.

[5] An investigation commission of the International Civil Aviation Organization determined that a bomb placed in a container in location 13-R in the forward cargo hold caused the destruction of the aircraft.

[2] Five years previously, on 10 March 1984, a bomb destroyed another UTA aircraft from Brazzaville shortly after the DC-8 had landed at N'Djamena airport.

[11] The investigators obtained a confession from one of the alleged terrorists, a Congolese opposition figure, who had helped recruit a fellow dissident to smuggle the bomb onto the aircraft.

French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière identified them, as follows: In 1999, the six Libyans were put on trial in the Paris Assize Court for the bombing of UTA Flight 772.

[16] However, the families of the seven American victims refused to accept their US$1 million awards and are pursuing the Libyan government through a federal court in Washington.

In October 2008 Libya paid $1.5 billion into a fund which will be used to compensate relatives of the As a result, U.S. President George W. Bush signed an executive order restoring the Libyan government's immunity from terror-related lawsuits and dismissing all of the pending compensation cases in the U.S. [21] In Manipulations Africaines (African Manipulations), published in February 2001, Pierre Péan investigated the sabotage of UTA Flight 772.

He alleged that evidence pointed to Iran and Syria (acting through the Hezbollah movement), but that due to political context (notably the Gulf War), France and the United States tried to put the blame on Libya.

He accuses judge Jean-Louis Bruguière of deliberately neglecting proof of Lebanon, Syria and Iran being involved to pursue only the Libyan trail.

"[23] In 2007 a memorial was created in the desert by Les Familles de l'Attentat du DC-10 d'UTA, an association of the victims' families.

In order to retain the sanctity of the crash site, the memorial is about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi; 5.4 nmi) away from it, so that it can be seen from planes following the same air route as Flight 772.