Wreckage of Air Algerie plane carrying 116 people found in Mali

"The herders were in the bush and saw the plane fall," Louis Berthaud, a community counsellor in Gossi, told Reuters by telephone. "It must have been a storm and it was struck by lightning. They said it was on fire as it fell, before it crashed."

Asked if he suspected a terrorist attack, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said authorities believed the cause of the crash may have been bad weather, but no hypothesis had been excluded.

French President Francois Hollande had earlier cancelled a planned visit to overseas territories and said France - which has some 1,700 troops stationed in Mali - would use all military means on the ground to locate the aircraft.

"We cannot identify the causes of what happened," Hollande told reporters.

Much of northern Mali lies in the hands of Tuareg separatist rebels, who rose up against the government in early 2012, triggering an Islamist revolt that briefly seized control of northern Mali. A French-led international operation in early 2013 broke the Islamists control over northern Mali.

Relatively clean record

The MD-83 is part of the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 family of twin-engine jets that entered service in 1980. A total of 265 of the MD-83 model were delivered before McDonnell Douglas, by then part of Boeing, halted production in 1999.

"Boeing is aware of the report. We are awaiting additional information," a spokesman for the U.S. planemaker said.

According to the Ascend Fleets database held by British-based Flightglobal, there are 187 MD-83s still in operation, of which 80 percent are being flown in the United States.

The aircraft's two engines are made by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies.

Swiftair has a relatively clean safety record, with five accidents since 1977, two of which caused a total of eight deaths, according to the Washington-based Flight Safety Foundation.

Air Algerie's last major accident was in 2003 when one of its planes crashed shortly after take-off from the southern city of Tamanrasset, killing 102 people. In February, 77 people died when an Algerian military transport plane crashed into a mountain in eastern Algeria.