An Air Algerie flight crashed on Thursday en route from
Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers with 110 passengers on board, an
Algerian aviation official said.
There were few clear indications of what might have happened
to the aircraft, or whether there were casualties, but Burkina Faso Transport
Minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said it asked to change route at 0138 GMT because
of a storm in the area.
"I can confirm that it has crashed," the Algerian
official told Reuters, declining to be identified or give any details about
what had happened to the aircraft on its way north.
An Air Algerie flight crashed on Thursday en route from
Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers with 110 passengers on board, an
Algerian aviation official said.
There were few clear indications of what might have happened
to the aircraft, or whether there were casualties, but Burkina Faso Transport
Minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said it asked to change route at 0138 GMT because
of a storm in the area.
"I can confirm that it has crashed," the Algerian
official told Reuters, declining to be identified or give any details about
what had happened to the aircraft on its way north.
Almost half of the passengers were French citizens, an
airline official said.
Two French fighter jets based in the region have been
dispatched to try to locate the airliner along its probable route, a French
army spokesman said. Niger security sources said planes were flying over the
border region with Mali to search for the flight. Algeria's state news agency
APS said authorities lost contact with flight AH 5017 an hour after it took off
from Burkina Faso, but other officials gave differing accounts of the times of
contact, adding to confusion about the plane's fate.
Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the plane,
confirmed it had lost contact with the MD-83 operated by Air Algerie, which it
said was carrying 110 passengers and six crew.
A diplomat in the Malian capital Bamako said that the north
of the country - which lies on the plane's likely flight path - was struck by a
powerful sandstorm overnight.Whatever the cause, another plane crash is likely
to add to nerves in the industry after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed
over Ukraine last week, a TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a
thunderstorm on Wednesday and airlines canceled flights into Tel Aviv due to
the conflict in Gaza.
An Air Algerie representative in Burkina Faso, Kara Terki,
told a news conference that all the passengers on the plane were in transit, either
for Europe, the Middle East or Canada.
He said the passenger list included 50 French, 24 Burkinabe,
eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two from Luxembourg, one Belgian, one Swiss,
one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian and one Romanian. Lebanese officials
said there were at least 10 Lebanese citizens on the flight.
A spokeswoman for SEPLA, Spain’s pilots union, said the six
crew were from Spain. She could not give any further details.
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