There are no survivors of the Air Algerie passenger plane that crash in southern Mali, French President Francois Hollande has said.
French soldiers have reached the wreckage south of Gao. "French soldiers on the ground have started the first investigations,” Hollande said on Friday. “Sadly there are no survivors. The plane's debris is concentrated in a small area, but it is too early to draw conclusions."
He said troops had recovered the black box flight recorder.
Bad weather is suspected of causing the crash with 116 passengers on board as it travelled from Burkina Faso to Algeria on Thursday.
Burkina Faso’s commander-in-chief General Gilbert Diendere told French TV BFM that civilian and military experts have already started examining the crash site. He said many bodies were found around the wreckage.
Flight AH 5017, which took off from Ouagadougou for Algiers, was 50 minutes into its journey when air traffic control lost contact.
The company that owns the aircraft, Swiftair, issued a statement saying it was too early to determine the cause of the accident.
Spanish TV channel RTVE said the two pilots, Agustin Comerón and Isabel Gost, were from the island of Mallorca while the other four crew were based in Madrid.
According to Spanish media, the company had a clean safety record. The Flight Safety Foundation said: “Swiftair passed the IATA [International Air Transport Association] Operational Safety Audit benchmark for global safety management.”
The foundation said Swiftair’s aircraft have been involved in four previous accidents, including a training flight that crashed in 1998, killing two pilots.
Spanish news agency Europa Press reported that it could tak eup to two years to discover the reason for the Air Algerie disaster, depending on the information found on the aircraft’s recorders.
Swiftair has a fleet of 30 planes operating in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. It also has subsidiary companies in Greece and Morocco.
* Isabelle Birambaux in Madrid contributed to this story
