The Air Algerie flight with five Canadians among the 110 passengers has crashed in Telemsi, Mali, the airline announced.

Flight 5017 vanished off the radar early Thursday over northern Mali while a heavy storm pounded the area.

The airline says the plane went down in Tilemsi, about 70 km from the city of Gao, capital of Mali’s Goa region.

The flight, carrying 110 passengers and six crew, took off from Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, late Wednesday night and disappeared from the radar nearly an hour later, according to the official Algerian news agency APS.

The flight was headed to the Algerian capital and was scheduled to land at 1:10 a.m. local time Thursday. It did not arrive.

In addition to the five Canadians, passengers on the flight included 51 French nationals, 27 people from Burkina Faso, eight from Lebanon, six Algerians, four Germans, two Luxembourg nationals and one passenger each from Switzerland, Belgium, Egypt, Ukraine, Nigeria, Cameroon and Mali, said Burkina Faso’s Transport Minister Jean Bertin Ouedraogo.

Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs has not immediately responded to a request from CTV News for comment.

In a Facebook post, the Ouagadougou Airport reported the identity of one passenger and the vocations of two others.

Post by Aéroport de Ouagadougou.

However, numerous news outlets have since reported Castro was not, in fact, on the plane.

Officials in France were setting up a crisis centre in the Foreign Ministry offices, according to French Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier.

Air Algerie Flight 5017 was being operated by Spanish airline Swiftair, according to a company statement. The plane itself belonged to Swiftair and was being operated by a crew from Spain, the statement said.

The plane’s flight path from Ouagadougou to Algiers was not immediately made public. But Algiers is a nearly straight shot north of Ouagadougou and a flight between the two cities would likely pass over Mali, where al Qaeda-linked rebels have taken control in the north.

French troops attempted to break the extremists’ hold on the region in a military operation last year. However, ethnic Tuareg separatists have continued their fight against the government.

A senior French official told the Associated Press that it is unlikely that rebel fighters in Mali have the firepower to shoot down a plane.

The disappearance of flight 5017 follows a series of recent plane disasters, including the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines flight over Ukraine exactly one week ago. Another Malaysia Airlines flight disappeared from radar earlier this year and has not been found.

-- with files from The Associated Press and CTV Montreal