The black box of Air Algerie flight AH5017 has been located as officials indicate poor weather was the probable cause of the crash that claimed 116 lives.
The plane crashed en route from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers while carrying 110 passengers – half of them French – and six crew.
French president Francois Hollande says the plane's black box flight recorder has been found and confirmed there were no survivors.
"French military has recovered the flight recorder and is taking it to the city of Gao," Mr Hollande said.
Mali government officials confirmed the charred wreckage has been found between Aguelhoc and Kida.
French soldiers have secured the crash site.
Investigators at the scene say the MD-83 airliner broke apart when it hit the ground, making it unlikely to have been the victim of any attack.
Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve says bad weather conditions most likely caused the crash, but added that he was not ruling out other hypotheses.
"We think that this plane crashed for reasons pertaining to meteorological conditions," he said on RTL radio.
The passenger list initially released by authorities in Burkina Faso included 51 French, 27 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, five Canadians, four Germans, two from Luxembourg, one Cameroonian, one Belgian, one Egyptian, one Ukrainian, one Swiss, one Nigerian and one Malian.
French authorities have updated the count of French nationals on the flight to 54, not 51 as first thought.
The jet's Spanish crew had signalled they were altering course due to difficult weather conditions, and company sources and officials said there had been reports of heavy storms at the time.
Mr Cuvillier says the possibility of a strike from the ground had been ruled out "from the start", rejecting speculation that rebels in Mali's restive north could have shot the plane down.
French nationals Bruno Cailleret and Caroline Boisnard and their two children Elno, 14, and Chloe, 10, were on board the flight.
The family's hometown Menet in central France is "devastated" by the news that the entire family has been lost in the crash.
Menet town hall spokeswoman Denise Labbe says the family was returning from a trip to Burkina Faso and were scheduled to arrive in France at Marseille in the country's south.
"Everyone is devastated in the town. We all know the family, they live in front of the town hall," she said.
"No one can quite believe it - it's like having a bad dream."
Ms Boisnard's mother was also travelling with the family.
French troops in Mali to assist operations
Earlier, Mr Hollande cancelled a planned visit to overseas territories and mobilised French military troops stationed in Mali to search for the lost flight.
Much of northern Mali lies in the hands of Tuareg separatist rebels, who rose up against the government in early 2012, triggering an Islamist revolt that briefly seized control of northern Mali.
A French-led international operation in early 2013 broke the Islamists control over northern Mali.
The MD-83 is part of the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 family of twin-engine jets that entered service in 1980.
A total of 265 of the MD-83 model were delivered before McDonnell Douglas, by then part of Boeing, halted production in 1999.
Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the aircraft, has a relatively clean safety record, with five accidents since 1977, two of which caused a total of eight deaths, according to the Washington-based Flight Safety Foundation.
Air Algerie's last major accident was in 2003 when one of its planes crashed shortly after takeoff from the southern city of Tamanrasset, killing 102 people.
In February, 77 people died when an Algerian military transport plane crashed into a mountain in eastern Algeria.
ABC/wires
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