An Air Algerie plane has gone missing over Mali, disappearing off of the radar somewhere between Burkina Faso and Algiers. Officials are now reportedly searching for wreckage, as Algerian officials have confirmed the flight crashed on Thursday en route from Ouagadougou.

The official Algerian news agency APS said air navigation services lost track of the Swiftair plane less than an hour after take-off in the early hours of Thursday, but gave conflicting accounts of the last time contact had been made, which added to confusion.

"I can confirm that it has crashed," the Algerian official told Reuters. The official declined to be identified or give any further details.

Almost half of the passengers were French citizens, an airline official said.

After news of the plane's disappearance spread, the French dispatched two fighter jets based in the region to try to locate the airliner along its probable route, a French army spokesman said.

Niger security sources have confirmed that planes were flying over the border region with Mali to search for the flight, according to Reuters.

The area north of the country, which was likely the area of the plane's flight path, was struck by a powerful sandstorm overnight, according to a diplomat in Bamako, the Malian capital.

The news of the missing plane comes just days after a Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down over Ukraine last week.

A number of other flights have had issues over the last week, as TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a thunderstorm just one day before the news of Air Algerie, and a number of airlines canceled flights into Tel Aviv due to the conflict in Gaza.

According to an Air Algerie representative, all the passengers on the plane were in transit, either for Europe, the Middle East or Canada.

The Air Algerie representative also stated that the passenger list included 50 French, 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.

According to Reuters, the area surrounding Ouagadougou, the capital of the west African nation of Burkina Faso, is almost directly south of Algiers, which means the plane would likely have been passing over Mali, where unrest continues in the north.

However, a senior French official said it was unlikely that fighters in Mali had weaponry that could shoot down a plane; rather, the fighters presumably have shoulder-fired weapons, which could not hit an aircraft at cruising altitude.