Investigators have begun combing the wreckage of an Air Algerie airliner that crashed in Mali on Thursday killing all 118 people aboard, almost half of them French, in the third big international civil aviation disaster in the past week.
French ministers pointed the finger of blame at bad weather conditions as the likeliest cause of the crash, but cautioned it was too early to be certain.
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President François Hollande confirmed on Friday morning there were no survivors in what he described as a terrible tragedy.
“At this moment all my thoughts go to the victims and their families,” he told reporters in Paris.
He said the last contact by the crew was about a change of course due to severe storms, but added: “We are ruling nothing out.”
Mr Hollande said French troops stationed in Mali as part of France’s operations against Islamist militants in the region had secured the crash site in the Gossi region, close to the Burkina Faso border, southwest of the northern Malian town of Gao.
He said the wreckage was “concentrated in a limited space” and one of the aircraft’s “black box” flight recorders had already been found and was being sent to Gao. Pictures from the crash site showed debris scattered in mainly small pieces over desert-like scrubland. A few larger pieces of twisted debris were also visible.
Frédéric Cuvillier, transport minister, said on Friday the government did not believe the airliner had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile, saying the possibility was “highly improbable, if not impossible”. There was no official suggestion of a bomb on board.
Laurent Fabius, foreign minister, said it was premature to draw conclusions “but what we can say for sure is there was big storm activity in the zone”.
The crash followed the apparent shooting down last week of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over eastern Ukraine with almost 300 people aboard and the death of 48 people when a Taiwanese airliner crashed on Wednesday.
It also followed the temporary suspension of many flights into Tel Aviv this week due to fears of rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip.
There were 54 French citizens on flight AH5017, which disappeared early on Thursday less than an hour after taking off from Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, bound for Algiers.
The 18-year-old McDonnell Douglas MD-83 aircraft was operated by Spanish charter specialist Swiftair. It had a Spanish crew of six and there were more than a dozen other nationalities on board.
France has been leading a military campaign against Islamist militants in Mali since it launched a major intervention in January 2013 to stop a jihadist offensive that threatened to overthrow the government of the former French colony.
It still has 1,600 troops in the country, supported by helicopters, drones and other equipment. French Mirage 2000 jets stationed in N’Djamena in Chad joined the search for the Air Algerie airliner.
The area in which the aircraft crashed remains disputed by Tuareg rebels as well as Islamist groups, making the investigation into the crash potentially difficult.
An Air Algerie official in Burkina Faso said the passengers included 24 Burkinabe, eight Lebanese, four Algerians, two from Luxembourg, one Belgian, one Swiss, one Nigerian, one Cameroonian, one Ukrainian and one Romanian.
Lebanese officials said there were at least 10 Lebanese citizens on the flight.
In France, special groups have been set up to aid families in a number of cities where the French passengers were due to land as their final destination. Mr Hollande cancelled a trip to the French overseas territory of Reunion to remain in Paris to oversee the management of the air crash crisis.
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