07/28/2014 (press release: media1press)
A Boeing MD-83, chartered by Air Algerie from Spanish company Swiftair crashed on Thursday in Mali with 112 passengers and seven crew members on board.
None of the passengers and crew on board survived. The crash site was identified on Thursday near the village of Boulikessi.
Morocco’s Medi1 TV quoted a reliable source in Rabat as saying that the plane went down in Amguillis, 110 kilometers from the northern town of Kidal. The aircraft vanished from radar screens in the early hours of Thursday morning 50 minutes into a four hour flight from Ouagadougou to Algiers.
Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the plane, confirmed it had lost contact with the MD-83 operated by Air Algerie. An Algerian aviation official earlier said: “I can confirm that it has crashed,” declining to give details of where the plane was or what caused the accident.
Almost half of the passengers were French citizens. The other victims included people from Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Romania, Switzerland, Ukraine, Burkina Faso, Lebanon, Algeria, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon and Egypt.
The crash was the third air disaster within a week, including a Malaysia Airlines flight last Friday. The cause of the crash has not yet been determined, but it was being increasingly blamed on bad weather which had forced the pilots to divert course.
