A Ukrainian cargo plane crashed in the Sahara desert early on Saturday, killing all seven people on board, Algeria's transport ministry said.

The Antonov 12, which had come from Glasgow in Scotland and was bound for Equatorial Guinea, came down near Tamanrasset airport at around 2:40 am (0140 GMT), a ministry statement said.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika dismissed regime veteran Abdelaziz Belkhadem as his special adviser on Tuesday, the presidential office announced, capping a dramatic downfall for the Islamist-leaning former premier.

Belkhadem, 68, had long been seen as the regime's go-between with moderate Islamists and his sacking comes after Algeria firmly put itself in the anti-Islamist camp alongside Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Peace talks between the Malian government and mainly Tuareg rebels will not resume until September 1 after both sides asked for more time to prepare, mediator Algeria said on Wednesday.

The substantive round of negotiations had been due to open in mid-August under a timetable agreed in preliminary talks in Algiers in July.

An Air Algerie flight that crashed in Mali killing all 116 people on board broke up on impact after losing air speed and banking sharply, investigators said on Thursday.

Presenting the initial findings of a probe into the July 24 tragedy, Remi Jouty, the head of France's Bureau of Investigations and Analyses (BEA) air safety agency, also told reporters that the cockpit voice recording was currently unusable.

Lebanon has handed over DNA samples from relatives of 20 citizens killed in a July 24 Air Algerie plane crash in Mali, a foreign ministry source told Agence France-Presse on Friday.

Mali is leading the investigation into the crash in which 118 people were killed when their plane went down in a remote area on the southern edge of the Sahara.

Six people were killed and hundreds injured as panic gripped areas of the Algerian capital when an earthquake of 5.6 magnitude struck offshore early Friday, an emergency official said.

The crisis team member, revising an earlier casualty toll, said that four people had died after jumping off their balconies and two others of cardiac arrest.

Identifying the victims from last week's Air Algerie crash in Mali "could take weeks, months and maybe years", Algeria's chief of police said on Thursday.

An Air Algerie McDonnell Douglas 83 flying from Burkina Faso to Algiers crashed in northern Mali last Thursday, killing all 118 people on board.

A Lebanese delegation currently present in Mali to follow up on the doomed Air Algerie passenger plane's case is trying to transfer the bodies of the Lebanese victims who were on board despite the “difficulty” of the process.

A statement released by the media office of Higher Defense Council chief General Mohammed Kheir said on Wednesday that investigation is ongoing to reveal the details surrounding flight AH5017's crash, elaborating on the work of the Lebanese delegation in Mali.

Dressed in protective white overalls, French experts sift through the debris of the Air Algerie plane that disintegrated over the northern Mali desert last week, killing all 118 on board.

Yet for days of meticulous searching across the shifting sands of the remote crash site at the southern edge of the Sahara desert, they have yet to see a single intact body.

The Lebanese delegation currently present in Mali to follow-up on the Algerian plane's tragedy is preparing for examining the bodies of the Lebanese passengers who were on board, as the results of the DNA tests are expected to take at least two more weeks to be revealed.

"The Lebanese delegation met with concerned French authorities who assured that looking for victims' bodies will take up to two weeks,” LBCI television reported on Monday.