THE wreck of an Air Algerie plane that went missing with 116 people on board has been found in Mali in northern Africa, near the Burkina Faso border.
A co-ordinator for the crisis unit in Ouagadougou said the Algerian plane had been located 50 kilometres north of the Burkina Faso border.
It?s not yet known whether there are any survivors.
It?s the third major international aviation disaster in a week.
Flight AH5017 took off from Ouagadougou and was bound for Algiers.
On board were 50 French nationals, 24 from Burkina Faso, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, six Spanish, five Canadians, four Germans and two from Luxembourg, according to the airline.
The passenger manifest also included one person each from Belgium, Cameroon, Egypt, Mali, Nigeria, Romania, Switzerland and Ukraine as well as ?three nationalities yet to be determined??.
Flight AH5017 went missing in the early morning amid reports of heavy storms, company sources and officials said.
?The plane disappeared at Gao, 500 kilometres from the Algerian border. Several nationalities are among the victims,?? Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said earlier, before the wreckage was spotted.
Aviation sources said the airliner was a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 leased from Spanish company Swiftair.
Its six-member crew were all Spanish, said Spain?s airline pilots? union Sepla, and Swiftair confirmed the aircraft had gone missing less than an hour after takeoff.
Northern Mali was seized by jihadist groups for several months in 2012 and the region has remained unstable despite the Islamists being driven out in a French-led offensive.
In February this year, a C-130 military aircraft carrying 78 people crashed in poor weather in the mountainous northeast, killing more than 70 people.
The disappearance of the Air Algerie plane comes after a series of aviation disasters.
Fliers around the globe have been on edge ever since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared in March on its way to Beijing. Searchers have yet to find a single piece of wreckage from the jet with 239 people on board.
Last week, a Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down while flying over a war-torn section of Ukraine, and the US has blamed it on separatists firing a surface-to-air missile.
Earlier this week, US and European airlines started cancelling flights to Tel Aviv after a rocket landed near the city?s airport. Finally,
on Wednesday, a Taiwanese plane crashed during a storm, killing 48 people.