Algeria's national airline says it has lost contact with a plane carrying 110 passengers and six crew members after it disappeared off the radar on a flight from Burkina Faso to Algiers.
Air navigation services lost track of the Airbus A320 around 50 minutes after take-off early today.
It was last sited at 1.55am GMT, the official Algerian news agency said.
The flight should have landed in the Algerian capital at 5am GMT.
Vanished: Algeria's national airline says it has lost contact with a Airbus A320 plane carrying 110 passengers and six crew members after it disappeared off the radar on a flight from Burkina Faso to Algiers (file picture)
The flight path of AH5017 from Ouagadougou, the capital of the west African nation of Burkina Faso, to Algiers was not immediately clear.
A source from Air Algerie told the AFP news agency said contact was lost while it was still in Malian air space approaching the border with Algeria.
It added that the company initiated an 'emergency plan' in the search for flight AH5017, which flies the four-hour passenger route four times a week.
Ougadougou is in a nearly straight line south of Algiers, passing over Mali where unrest continues in the north.
One of Algeria's worst air disasters occurred in February this year, when a C-130 military aircraft carrying 78 people crashed in the mountainous northeast, killing more than 70 people.
Tamanrasset in the deep south was the site of the country's worst ever civilian air disaster, in March 2003.
In that accident, all but one of 103 people on board were killed when an Air Algerie passenger plane crashed on takeoff after one of its engines caught fire.
The sole survivor, a young Algerian soldier, was critically injured.
