French officials have dispatched a military unit to secure the site in Mali where an Air Algeria plane crashed in a heavy rainstorm with 116 people aboard.
A message posted today on the website of President Francois Hollande said the wreckage had been clearly identified despite the disintegration of the aircraft.
The MD-83 aircraft, owned by Spanish company Swiftair and leased by Algeria's flagship carrier, disappeared from radar less than an hour after it took off early yesterday from Burkina Faso's capital of Ouagadougou for Algiers. Earlier, officials in Burkina Faso said human remains and the burnt wreckage had been found about 50 kilometres from the border of Burkina Faso near the Malian village of Boulikessi.
"We sent men, with the agreement of the Mali government, to the site, and they found the wreckage of the plane with the help of the inhabitants of the area," said Gen Gilbert Diendere, a close aide to Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore and head of the crisis committee set up to investigate the flight.
The pilots had sent a final message to ask Niger air control to change its route because of heavy rain, Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedraogo said yesterday. The crash was the third airline disaster within a week.
Last week, a Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down while over war-torn eastern Ukraine, and the US has blamed it on separatists firing a surface-to-air missile.
On Wednesday, a Taiwanese plane crashed during a storm, killing 48 people.
French forces, who have been in Mali since January 2013 to rout al-Qaida-linked extremists who had controlled the north, had joined the search for the Air Algeria flight, alongside the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA.
Algerian aircraft also participated in the hunt.
Swiftair, a private Spanish airline, said the plane was carrying 110 passengers and six crew, and left Burkina Faso for Algiers at 0647 IST.
The passengers included 51 French, 27 Burkina Faso nationals, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, five Canadians, four Germans, two Luxembourg nationals, one Swiss, one Belgian, one Egyptian, one Ukrainian, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian and one Malian, Ouedraogo said. The six crew members were Spanish, according to the Spanish pilots' union.
