Airliner comes down in north Africa with 116 on board, including 51 French, after departing Burkina Faso for Algiers

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

An Algerian aircraft carrying 110 passengers and six crew crashed in northern Africa early on Thursday with the apparent death of all on board – the third airliner disaster in a week.

Flight AH5017 operated by Air Algérie vanished from radar screens around 50 minutes after taking off from Burkina Faso en route to Algiers. It had reportedly asked to divert from its planned course because of heavy rain and poor visibility over northern Mali.

Early on Friday authorities in Mali and Burkina Faso said wreckage had been found on Malian territory scattered and burned, with no survivors.

The office of the French president, François Hollande, later made the same announcement, saying the plane lay in pieces but had been positively identified. "A French military unit has been sent to secure the site and gather the first elements of information," said a statement from the Élysée Palace.

Malian state television said the plane crashed between the town of Gossi, about 30 miles (50km) from the Burkina Faso border. Reports of the discovery were repeated by government officials in both countries and by Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, the president of Mali.

There had been reports of massive sandstorms in the region before the plane disappeared shortly after changing course. It was not thought to have transmitted any distress signal.

Officials in Burkina Faso, Algeria and France said no hypotheses were being ruled out, including a terrorist bombing or hijack, but seriously doubted that the Islamist forces and militias in northern Mali possessed surface-to-air missiles powerful enough to shoot down the plane.

Almost half the passengers on board, 51 people, were reported to be French.

Locator map of where AH5017 disappeared

The three airliner crashes in the last week have claimed nearly 450 lives. Seven days ago Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 on board – including 193 Dutch citizens, 10 Britons, four Germans, four Belgians as well as dozens of Malaysians, Australians and Indonesians.

On Wednesday a TransAsia Airways flight in Taiwan crashed in bad weather, killing 48 passengers including two French exchange students.

Two French Mirage-2000 planes on Thursday searched the area where the Algeria-bound aircraft was thought to have crashed: the largely inaccessible region of Gao in northern Mali. Tension between various armed groups and militia, including Islamic extremists and Tuaregs, is high in the area. Its capital, Gao city, is on the river Niger about 190 miles south-east of Timbuktu.

The French president, François Hollande, summoned key ministers to a crisis meeting on Thursday afternoon, postponing a planned visit to France's Indian Ocean territories. He said "all military and civilian means" in the region of the crash would be mobilised to establish its cause.

France has 1,600 troops in Mali as part of Operation Serval, which started at the beginning of last year and is aimed at ousting Islamist militants in the north of the country.

Hollande said: "My thoughts are with the anguished families and friends waiting at airports and express our solidarity, the solidarity of the nation. It is a moment of pain for the families and friends of 116 people, 51 of whom are our compatriots. We are in a series [of crashes] but there is no series because every situation is different … we have to establish what happened."

Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, said the aircraft had "probably crashed".

"The search is concentrated on a vast part of Malian territory around Gao. Our forces in the region, including medical units, have been mobilised."

He said that if the crash were confirmed it would be "a major tragedy that has hit our whole nation and others".

The plane, a McDonnell Douglas 83, had taken off from the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou and was supposed to take a direct route to Algiers.

Air traffic controllers lost contact with the aircraft, owned by the Spanish company Swiftair, at 0117 GMT, but its disappearance was not made public until several hours after its 0410 GMT scheduled arrival time in the Algerian capital.

On Thursday evening, hours after the plane's disappearance, the exact identity of the passengers was still shrouded in confusion. French media reported that Zoheir Houaoui of Air Algérie had confirmed the plane was carrying 50 French passengers, six Algerians, one Malian, one Belgian, two from Luxembourg, five Canadians, one from Cameroon, four Germans, one Nigerian, eight Lebanese, one Romanian, 24 from Burkina Faso and six so far unidentified passengers. The six crew members – two pilots and four stewards – were all Spanish. Of the French passengers 22 were said to have been due to transfer on to flights to Paris or Marseilles after landing at Algiers.

France's air safety control body, the Direction Générale de l'Aviation Civil, said the plane that disappeared had been checked in Marseilles a few days ago and declared airworthy.

According to its corporate webpage, Swiftair was founded in 1986 and provides passenger and cargo planes in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The McDonnell Douglas MD-83 is part of the MD-80 series of aircraft, with a range of up to 4,600km. It is capable of carrying up to 167 passengers.

Gerard Arnoux, an Air France pilot, said the plane was "old" but its age was less important than the fact it appeared to have been maintained.

"It's an old plane, made probably in the 1990s, but I don't have any problem in that. It's a good aircraft," he told French television station BFMTV.

The French foreign ministry issued an emergency number for concerned families: + 33 1 43 17 56 46