Randa Daher and her daughter, two reported Lebanese passengers who were on the ill-fated plane.

ALGIERS — An Air Algerie flight crashed on Thursday, July 24, en route from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers with 110 passengers on board, an Algerian aviation official said.

There were few clear indications of what might have happened to the aircraft, or whether there were casualties, but Burkina Faso Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedrago said it asked to change route at 0138 GMT because of a storm in the area.

“I can confirm that it has crashed,” the Algerian official told Reuters, declining to be identified or give any details about what had happened to the aircraft on its way north.

Almost half of the passengers were French citizens, an airline official said. The Lebanese Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a statement Thursday saying that the Lebanese embassy in Abidjan informed it that 20 Lebanese were onboard the ill-fated plane.

Two French fighter jets based in the region have been dispatched to try to locate the airliner along its probable route, a French army spokesman said. 

Niger security sources said planes were flying over the border region with Mali to search for the flight. Algeria’s state news agency APS said authorities lost contact with flight AH 5017 an hour after it took off from Burkina Faso, but other officials gave differing accounts of the times of contact, adding to confusion about the plane’s fate.

Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the plane, confirmed it had lost contact with the MD-83 operated by Air Algerie, which it said was carrying 110 passengers and six crew.

A diplomat in the Malian capital Bamako said that the north of the country – which lies on the plane’s likely flight path – was struck by a powerful sandstorm overnight.

Whatever the cause, another plane crash is likely to add to nerves in the industry after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed over Ukraine last week, a TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a thunderstorm on Wednesday and airlines canceled flights into Tel Aviv due to the conflict in Gaza.

Kara Terki, an Air Algerie representative in Burkina Faso, told a news conference that all the passengers on the plane were in transit, either for Europe, the Middle East or Canada.