MOSCOW, July 25 (RIA Novosti) – The French president’s office confirmed Friday reports that the wreckage of an Air Algerie plane has been found in Mali near the Burkina Faso border, Agence France-Presse has reported.
A “French military unit has been sent to [the area] to secure the site and gather evidence,” the president’s office said, adding that the jet was clearly identified despite the fact that it had “disintegrated.”
General Gilbert Diendiere of the Burkina Faso army said: “We have found the Algerian plane. The wreck has been located … 50 kilometers [30 miles] north of the Burkina Faso border” in Mali’s region of Gossi.
"At the moment we have no further information on [the fate of] the passengers but our teams are hard at work," he said, failing to comment on the possible cause of the crash.
Air Algerie’s MD-83 plane went off radar screens in Burkina Faso earlier on Thursday. Contact with the aircraft was lost 50 minutes after it departed from Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou.
Some 116 people from 15 countries, mostly from France, were on board the plane. All passengers and crew members supposedly died in a crash.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the aircraft model was A320. This information was originally provided by an Algerian official.
