Six Europeans on board fatal flight

Six Europeans were on board an Algerian airliner which crashed soon after take-off deep from in the Sahara Desert today, killing 102 people.

There was one survivor.

One of the two engines on the Air Algerie Boeing 737 caught fire just before the crash, said witnesses.

Flight 6289 had just taken off from the town of Tamanrasset bound for the capital, Algiers, 990 miles to the north.

Terrorism was not suspected, said airline spokesman Hamid Hamdi. “There was a mechanical problem on take-off. There is no element that leads us to think there was a terrorist attack.”

Algeria, an oil and gas rich nation in North Africa, has been struggling to end an 11-year-long insurgency by Islamic militants that has claimed 120,000 lives.

Six Europeans were among the 97 passengers but their nationalities were not immediately known, said Hamdi. The remaining passengers and six crew members were Algerians, he said.

“Unfortunately, we know only of one survivor,” he said. The survivor’s nationality was not known. The whole flight should have taken just over two hours.

Prime Minister Ali Benflis set up a crisis unit at airports in Algiers and Tamanrasset to deal with the crash, thought to be the first in the history of Algerian commercial aviation.

An investigative unit was also set up at the Tamanrasset airport.