An Air
Algerie plane with around 120 people on board, including French and
Spanish nationals, went missing Thursday during a flight from Burkina
Faso to Algiers, company sources and officials said.
Aviation
sources told AFP the aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 leased from
Spanish company Swiftair carrying passengers of different
nationalities.
Its six-member crew were all Spanish,
said Spain's airline pilots' union Sepla, while Swiftair confirmed the
aircraft had gone missing less than an hour after taking off from
Ouagadougou.
Many French nationals were thought to be on board the plane, France's Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier said in Paris.
He
said after a government meeting that top civil aviation officials were
holding an emergency meeting and a crisis cell had been set up.
CONTACT LOST
Earlier reports had said the plane was a DC-9.
"The
plane disappeared at Gao (in Mali), 500 kilometres (300 miles) from the
Algerian border. Several nationalities are among the victims," Prime
Minister Abdelmalek Sellal was cited as saying by Algerian radio.
The
Air Algerie source earlier said contact was lost while the airliner was
still in Malian airspace and 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.
CHANGE OF COURSE REQUSETED
"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
airline source said.
"Contact was lost after the change of course."
The
carrier, in a statement carried by national news agency APS, said it
initiated an "emergency plan" in the search for flight AH5017, which
flies the four-hour passenger route four times a week.
One
of Algeria's worst air disasters occurred in February this year, when a
C-130 military aircraft carrying 78 people crashed in poor weather in
the mountainous northeast, killing more than 70 people.
The
plane was flying from the desert garrison town of Tamanrasset in
Algeria's deep south to Constantine, 320 kilometres (200 miles) east of
Algiers.
RECENT CRASHES
Tamanrasset was the site of the country's worst ever civilian air disaster, in March 2003.
In
that accident, all but one of 103 people on board were killed when an
Air Algerie passenger plane crashed on take-off after one of its engines
caught fire.
The sole survivor, a young Algerian soldier, was critically injured.
In
December 2012, two Algerian military jets on a routine training mission
collided in mid-air near Tlemcen in the northwest, killing both pilots.
A
month earlier, a twin-turboprop CASA C-295 military transport aircraft,
which was carrying a cargo of paper for the printing of banknotes in
Algeria, crashed in southern France.
The five soldiers and one central bank representative on board were all killed.
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