The Missing Algerie Plane has crashed - says Officials

An Air Algerie flight that went missing en route from Burkina Faso to Algiers has crashed, an Algerian aviation official told Reuters on Thursday.

“I can confirm that it has crashed,” the official said, declining to give details of where the plane was or what caused the accident.

A company source told AFP that the missing aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and that some 110 people of various nationalities are listed as being on board the flight.

The source said contact with the aircraft was lost while it was still in Malian airspace approaching the border with Algeria.

Despite international military intervention still under way, the situation remains unstable in northern Mali, which was seized by jihadist groups for several months in 2012.

On July 17, the Bamako government and armed groups from northern Mali launched tough talks in Algiers aimed at securing an elusive peace deal, and with parts of the country still mired in conflict.

“The plane was not far from the Algerian frontier when the crew was asked to make a detour because of poor visibility and to prevent the risk of collision with another aircraft on the Algiers-Bamako route,” the Air Algerie source said.

“Contact was lost after the change of course.”

The airline announced that the plane had gone missing in a brief statement carried by national news agency APS.

“Air navigation services have lost contact with an Air Algerie plane Thursday flying from Ouagadougou to Algiers, 50 minutes after takeoff,” the statement said.

It added that the company initiated an “emergency plan” in the search for flight AH5017, which flies the four-hour passenger route four times a week.

Passenger list

The passenger list included 50 French citizens, the airline's representative in Burkina Faso told a news conference in Ouagadougou.

Two French fighter jets based in West Africa have been deployed to try and locate the plane, a French army spokesman said on Thursday.
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Black boxes from the Air Algerie plane that crashed in northern Mali last week will be transferred to France for analysis, the French embassy in Mali said, as officials prepared for the process of identifying the remains of the dead.

UN peacekeepers located the second black box on Saturday amid the wreckage of the plane that took off from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and was heading to Algiers, Algeria when it crashed early Thursday in northern Mali near the border with Burkina Faso.

The crash killed 118 people, 54 of whom were French.

"The two black boxes from the plane will be transferred from Gao to Bamako and then the Malian authorities will give them to French gendarmes experts so they can be taken to Paris," said Didier Nourrison, a spokesman for the French embassy in Bamako.

French authorities say extreme bad weather was the likely cause of the crash but aren't ruling out other possibilities, including terrorism.http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11300096