United Nations experts said they had recovered a second so-called black box at the crash site of Air Algerie flight AH5017 that went down in the desert in southern Mali.
Reuters says that "initial evidence taken from the remote crash site indicates that the aircraft broke apart when it smashed to the ground early on Thursday morning, making an attack appear unlikely."
The plane was en route from Ouagadougou, the capital of the West African nation of Burkina Faso, to Algiers when it suddenly disappeared from radar.
The death toll of 118 — 112 passengers and six crew — includes 54 French citizens. The Guardian reports that ten members of the same French family were among the victims.
The first of the data recorders has already been found and analyzed, French President Francois Hollande said on Friday.
The New York Times says:
"The wreckage of Flight 5017 was found by an international search team just before nightfall on Thursday in an isolated area, about 60 miles south of the town of Gao in eastern Mali. Soldiers from Burkina Faso, who were the first to arrive on the scene, said they had found several bodies among the burned-out hull of the plane, a Boeing MD-83."
"'We think the aircraft crashed for reasons linked to the weather conditions,' Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, said in an interview on the French radio station RTL."
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