(AP) -- France's foreign minister says the Air Algerie flight that has gone missing over Mali has "probably crashed."

Laurent Fabius says "no trace" of the plane has been found. Two French fighter jets are among aircraft scouring the rugged north of Mali for the MD-83 that was traveling from the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou to Algiers, the Algerian capital.

About half of the passengers were French.

The plane had been missing for hours before the news was made public. Mali is between Burkina Faso and Algeria. Unrest has plagued the northern part of Mali in recent years. But a senior French official says it seems unlikely that fighters in Mali would have the kind of weapons that could shoot down a plane.

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Associated Press journalists Ciaran Giles in Madrid, Spain, and Elaine Ganley and Sylvie Corbet in Paris, contributed to this report.