France said Monday the pilots of the Air Algerie passenger plane that crashed in Mali, killing all 118 people on board, had asked to turn back in a new development to a complex probe into the tragedy.

"What we know for sure is that the weather was bad that night, that the plane crew had asked to change route then to turn back before all contact was lost," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters in his latest briefing about last week's disaster.

Flags flew at half-mast in France Monday in mourning for the 118 victims of the Air Algerie plane tragedy, as investigators waited for the black boxes from the crash to arrive.

Thousands of kilometers away on the remote desert site of the accident in Mali, experts were sifting through the remains of the aircraft to try and determine why it plunged to the ground with such force that it completely disintegrated.

The black boxes from the Air Algerie plane disaster on Sunday began their journey to France from northern Mali as investigators ramped up efforts to find the cause of the deadly crash.

Mali's Communications Minster Mahamadou Camara told Agence France-Presse the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder had been taken to the capital Bamako from the remote desert crash site and would now be "handed over to French authorities" and then travel on to France later Sunday.

An official Lebanese delegation headed on Sunday to Paris en rout to Mali to follow up the probe into the Air Algerie plane that crashed three-days ago and to carry out the necessary procedures to identify the bodies of the Lebanese victims.

Haitham Jomaa,director general of the emigrants dept. at Lebanon's foreign ministry, chaired a delegation to follow up the probe into the crash of the McDonnell Douglas 83, which crashed over Mali on Thursday.

French investigators Sunday scoured through the debris of a shattered Air Algerie jetliner in Mali's remote desert north to get to the cause of the third global air disaster in eight days.

U.N. experts investigating the Air Algerie plane disaster in Mali have recovered the second black box from the doomed plane, a spokesman of U.N. peacekeepers in the country said Saturday.

"The second black box was found this morning at the crash site" by experts of the peacekeeping mission serving in Mali, Radhia Achouri told Agence France Presse by telephone. The first black box was found Friday.

All passengers and crew on board an Air Algerie jetliner that crashed in Mali died in the tragedy, which completely wiped out several families, France announced.

As the first images emerged of the crash site, showing a charred landscape and debris scattered over a wide area, French President Francois Hollande said in a sombre televised address: "Sadly, there are no survivors."

France announced on Friday there were no survivors among the 116 people on board the Air Algerie flight that crashed over Mali, saying bad weather was the likely cause of the disaster.

"Sadly, there are no survivors," President Francois Hollande said on television, a day after flight AH017, carrying 54 French nationals, went down shortly after take-off from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso.

An Air Algerie plane missing since early Thursday over Mali with 116 passengers and crew, including some 50 French nationals, on board probably crashed, French President Francois Hollande said.

Speaking on French television, Hollande said: "Everything leads us to believe that the plane has crashed."

Several Lebanese nationals were onboard an Algerian plane that went missing Thursday during a flight from Burkina Faso to Algiers.

An official source in Lebanon told Agence France-Presse that at least 20 Lebanese nationals were on the flight, including three couples with 10 children.