Peacekeeping plane crashes in Egypt's Sinai, 9 dead

ISMAILIA, Egypt, May 6 (Reuters) A plane belonging to the multinational observer force that monitors the Egyptian-Israeli border crashed today in the Sinai peninsula, killing nine people, most of them French, security sources said.

The sources said the aircraft had hit a truck while trying to make an emergency landing on a Sinai road, but managed to briefly regain altitude before finally crashing and exploding.

''I heard a loud explosion and saw fire. I saw remains on a wide area. There was no one alive,'' said Abdel Qader Salman, a Bedouin man from central Sinai, where the crash occurred.

Security sources said they believed the crash of the twin engine propeller plane was caused by mechanical problems, although the plane's black box had not yet been recovered. Foul play was not suspected.

The charred remains of five people were found in the wreckage, and a search was under way for remains of four other passengers recorded as having boarded the plane, Egyptian aviation and security sources said.

Eight French nationals were aboard the plane, which was on a training and orientation mission, the director-general of the Multinational Force and Observers Mission in Sinai told Reuters.

Director-General Normand St. Pierre said he was checking into reports that a ninth person of a different nationality was also on board. Egyptian security sources said a ninth person, a Canadian soldier, had been on the plane.

Asked about the number of fatalities, St. Pierre said: ''We believe it's nine but we have not ourselves been on the ground to confirm that. At least I haven't got the report back.'' TRUCK DRIVER SURVIVES The Egyptian driver of the truck jumped from his vehicle as the plane hit it, and was believed to have survived although his truck caught fire and burned, security sources said. They were convinced all on the plane had died.

The plane had been heading from El-Gorah in northern Sinai, site of the observer force's main base, to Saint Catherine in the south when it crashed near al-Nakhel in central Sinai.

A French defence ministry spokesman said the aircraft, a small plane called a Twin Otter, was ''very likely'' French.

The crash was the second fatal transport accident this year involving members of the Sinai observer force, which has also been an occasional target for Islamist militants.

In March, eight Egyptian engineers from the observer force were killed in a road crash.

Last year, a suicide bomber blew himself up near an airport used by the multinational force. In August 2005, militants attacked a vehicle of the observers, injuring two Canadians.

More than 100 people, most of them Egyptians, have been killed in a string of three bomb attacks in Sinai since 2004 that the Egyptian government has blamed on Sinai bedouin.

The observer force, set up to supervise security provisions in the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, has contingents from 11 countries: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Fiji, France, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, the United States and Uruguay.

REUTERS KK PM1940