Algerian authorities have formed a "crisis office" tasked with receiving any information leading to the whereabouts of an Air Algerie flight, carrying 112 passengers and seven crew, which disappeared off the radar on a flight home from Burkina Faso.
At a lower house parliament session on Thursday, the Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said that the McDonnell-Douglas MD-83 aircraft lost contact during a storm only 50 minutes after taking off from Ouagadougou Airport at 0230 local Algerian time.
Authorities are so far describing the plane's fate, which remains unknown thus far, as being lost and have not raised the possibility whether it could have crashed.
Earlier, the French Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier said that there were "many French people" on board the flight.