Plane crash kills 102, 1 survives

ALGIERS, Algeria -- An Air Algerie jet caught fire on one of its engines and crashed shortly after takeoff from an airport deep in the Sahara Desert on Thursday, killing 102 people on board, the airline said. One person survived.\nThe crash of the Boeing 737 occurred minutes after the plane left the Algerian town of Tamanrasset bound for the capital, Algiers, nearly 1,000 miles to the north.\n"There was a mechanical problem on takeoff," said a spokesman for the airline, Hamid Hamdi. He said he had no other information about the cause of the crash. "Unfortunately, we know only of one survivor," he said.\nHamdi said there was "no element that leads us to think there was a terrorist attack."\nAlgeria, an oil- and gas-rich nation in North Africa, has been torn by a decade-long insurgency by Islamic militants that has left tens of thousands dead.\nWitnesses at the Tamanrasset airport and airline officials said one of the plane's two jet engines caught fire as it was taking off.\nSix Europeans were among the 97 passengers; their nationalities were not known, said Hamdi. The remaining passengers and six crew members were Algerians, he said. The nationality of the survivor was not known.\nAfter Thursday's crash, Prime Minister Ali Benflis convened emergency crisis units at the airports in Algiers and Tamanrasset to deal with the crash, thought to be the first in the history of Algerian commercial aviation.\nInterior Minister Yazid Zerhouni and Transportation Minister Abdelmalek Sellal were headed to the scene.\nHamdi, the airline spokesman, insisted that the downed plane had been well maintained.\n"This Boeing 737-200 was, at takeoff, in perfect working order," he said. State-run Air Algerie was set up in 1953 and this was its first crash, he said.\nTamanrasset, in the Hoggar Mountains, is a stop for Sahara Desert travelers in a region of ancient archaeological sites and prehistoric paintings and engravings. It was not immediately known whether foreign tourists were on board.\nThe site is also a meeting place for Tuaregs, nomadic people famed for their blue robes.\nMore than 120,000 people have been killed in the insurgency launched by Islamic militants after they were shut of out parliamentary elections in 1992.\nIn late 1994, one of Algeria's most radical groups, the Armed Islamic Group, hijacked an Air France plane, killing three passengers. Most international carriers stopped flights to Algeria after the hijacking, and Air Algerie flights to Paris were suspended for two years.\nAlgeria's army has been hunting down insurgents who refused President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's offer of amnesty for some militants willing to surrender their weapons. But militant groups have struck back, stepping up attacks on army convoys.