Breaking news: A plane has crashed with 116 passengers onboard.

Update:

Mali’s president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has told Reuters that wreckage of the missing flight was spotted between northern towns of Aguelhoc and Kidal.

Mamamia reported overnight:

Another plane disaster has rocked the world – coming exactly a week after flight MH17 was downed over Ukraine.

An Air Algerie flight with at least 116 passengers on board dropped off the radar over the Sahara as it crossed Mali in bad weather.

It now appears the plane crashed in a remote area of Mali.

Air Algerie said via Twitter that the plane has “apparently crashed in the Tilemsi area, about 70 kilometers from the southeastern city of Gao.” Flight 5017 lost radar contact 50 minutes after it was supposed to arrive at Algiers’ Houari Boumediene Airport about four hours later.

The BBC reports that the passenger list included 50 French citizens, 24 people from Burkina Faso, eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two from Luxembourg, one Belgian, one Swiss, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian, five Canadians; four Germans; two from Luxembourg and one Romanian.

Ouagadougou Airport said in a statement on its website that French forces stationed in the area had detected the wreck of the plane between Gao and the town of Kidal, in a desert zone that is very difficult to access as reported by The Independent.

The plane belongs to a private Spanish company, Swiftair, but it appears to have been operated by Air Algerie.

Swiftair said in a statement that the plane ”never reached its destination.

Islamist militants have been fighting the Malian government and French forces in the region for months. The town of Kidal was occupied some months ago by rebel fighters but French troops are now based there, backed up by the air force. According to The Independent the French-led intervention last year scattered the al Qaida-linked Islamic extremists but the Tuareg separatists have pushed back against the authority of the Bamako-based government.

The Independent says, “a senior French official said it is unlikely that fighters in Mali had the kind of weaponry that could shoot down a plane.”