Authorities say they located the wreckage of Air Algerie Flight AH5017 after it crashed in northern Mali with 116 passengers and crew on board, and there appear to be no survivors.  Nearly half of the people were French, en route from Burkina Faso to Algeria.

“We sent men, with the agreement of the Mali government, to the site, and they found the wreckage of the plane with the help of the inhabitants of the area,” said Burkina Faso Army General Gilbert Diendere.  “They found human remains and the wreckage of the plane totally burnt and scattered.”

Air traffic controllers lost contact with Flight AH5017 about 50 minutes after it left Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso en route to Algiers early on Thursday after pilots reported a severe sand storm.  The pilot was trying to change course.  A Tuareg separatist who saw the wreckage in the desert and in the village of Boulikessi said, “The plane was burned, there were traces of rain on the plane, and bodies were torn apart.”

Because of the ethnic Tuareg separatist movement in the region, there were initial fears that a missile might have downed the flight, as happened in Ukraine.  But the Tuareg don’t have surface to air missiles capable of such an act, according to security sources.

There were also earlier reports that Mariela Castro, daughter of Cuban leader Raul Castro and niece of Fidel, was on the flight – she was not.  Later in Havana, the prominent LGBT activist and director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education held a news conference to express her sympathies to the families of the victims, and chide the international corporate media for getting the story wrong.