French President Francois Hollande said Friday that all 116 people on board were killed when an Air Algerie plane crashed in northern Mali yesterday.
French officials have dispatched a military unit to secure the crash site in restive northern Mali, where one of the black boxes from the MD-83 aircraft, owned by the Spanish company Swiftair, has already been found amid the rubble.
France's interior minister said bad weather likely caused the crash, though the government hasn't ruled out an act of terrorism. Air Algerie Flight AH5017's Spanish crew had requested permission to change course due to bad weather before the jet disappeared from radar less than an hour after it left Burkina Faso's capital, Ouagadougou, for Algiers.
A French Reaper drone based in Niger spotted the wreckage in the Gossi region near the border with Burkina Faso. The recovered black box is set to travel to the northern Mali city of Gao.
Two helicopter teams also overflew, noting that the wreckage was in a concentrated area, French Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier told France-Info radio on Friday. A column of soldiers in some 30 vehicles were dispatched to the site, he said.
Quick discovery of the wreckage is 'decisive' in piecing together what happened, the transport minister said, describing the aircraft as 'disintegrated' and debris 'in an apparently small area.'
'We think the plane went down due to weather conditions, but no hypothesis can be excluded as long as we don't have the results of an investigation,' French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio.
'Terrorist groups are in the zone. ... We know these groups are hostile to Western interests,' Cazeneuve said. 5 Canadian victims
CBC News confirmed Thursday that four of the five Canadians on board the jet were from the same family: Winmalo Somda, his wife Angelica and their two children, from Quebec, were killed.
Isabelle Prévost, of Sherbrooke, was travelling with the Somda family when the plane went down over northern Mali.
Her partner, Danny Frappier, said Thursday that Prévost was on vacation and originally supposed to be travelling with the couple's three children, aged five, seven and nine.
Frappier said he tried to get more information from official sources but that details were not yet clear.
'We're hoping there's part of her body that can be repatriated, some kind of proof that she was really there, that she's really dead, I don't know,' he said Thursday.
Mamadou Zoungrana, who resides in Gatineau, Que., said he believes his wife and two young boys aged six and 13, were on board the flight. They are not Canadian citizens, but Zoungrana said they were on the plane as part of their trip to join him in Canada after two years apart.
He said he hoped that they would eventually be granted citizenship after settling with him.
With files from CBC News and The Canadian Press
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