* Air Algerie jet went missing en route to Algiers

* Burkina Faso says jet asked to change course due to storm

* Passenger list includes 51 French citizens (Adds Mali president, Burkina Faso general, Lebanese family)

(Reuters) – French warplanes and U.N. helicopters scoured the north of Mali on Thursday for the wreckage of an Air Algerie flight after it crashed carrying 110 passengers, nearly half of them French, from Burkina Faso to Algiers.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said authorities believed flight AH5017 may have encountered bad weather after the pilot requested to change direction shortly after takeoff due to a storm. However, he said no hypothesis had been excluded.

Officials in Mali and Burkina Faso gave conflicting accounts of locating the crash.

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said wreckage of the flight had been spotted in his country’s far north, toward the Algerian border between the towns of Aguelhoc and Kidal.

However, General Gilbert Diendere, a member of the crisis unit in Burkina Faso, said his team had found remains in southern Mali, 50 km (30 miles) from the Burkinabe border. Local authorities in the nearby town of Gossi also told Reuters the wreckage had been located here.

In Paris, Fabius said the flight, carrying 51 French nationals, had probably crashed but he said two French Mirage warplanes searching the vast desert area around the northern Malian city of Gao had spotted no wreckage.

“Despite intensive search efforts, no trace of the aircraft has yet been found,” Fabius told journalists.

An Algerian official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed the flight had crashed but provided no other details.

French President Francois Hollande 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.

“The search will take as long as needed,” Hollande told reporters. “Everything must be done to find this plane. We cannot identify the causes of what happened.”

The searchers mission is complicated by the vast scale and daunting terrain of Mali. The area where the flight is suspected to have crashed is a sparsely inhabited region of scrubland and desert dunes stretching to the foothills of the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains.

Much of it 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.

The Malian government has only a weak presence in the region and relies on French and U.N. peacekeepers for aircraft and logistical support.

Another plane crash is likely to add to nerves over flying after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed over Ukraine last week, a TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a thunderstorm on Wednesday and airlines temporarily cancelled flights into Tel Aviv due to the conflict in Gaza.

SOURCE REUTERS, Read more..