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.

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.

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.

A small town in central France was "devastated" Friday on hearing news that an entire family that lived there was on board the Air Algerie plane that crashed in Mali.

Bruno Cailleret and Caroline Boisnard, who lived in the 550-strong town of Menet, "were coming back from a trip to Burkina Faso with their two children, Elno, 14 and Chloe, 10," said Denise Labbe of the local town hall.

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.

"We heard about the disappearance of the plane on television". In French airports where some passengers of the missing Air Algerie flight were due to end their trip, relatives desperately waited for news of their loved ones.

Flight AH5017, which took off in Ouagadougou and was bound for Algiers, disappeared in the early morning over Mali with at least 116 passengers and crew on board, including around 50 French nationals -- some of whom were transiting through the Algerian capital on their way to France.

The Malian government and six rebel groups signed an accord on an end to hostilities as part of ongoing peace talks that opened in Algiers last week.

A ceasefire has been in force with the mainly Tuareg and Arab rebel groups since a last eruption of fighting in May.

A jihadist movement led by al-Qaida-linked Mokhtar Belmokhtar has claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack that killed a French soldier in Mali, the private Mauritanian news agency Alakhbar reported.

"A jihadist of our group succeeded in blowing up his booby-trapped vehicle against a unit of the invasion forces in the al-Moustarat region," killing one French soldier and wounding others, a spokesman for the group al-Mourabitoune, Abou Aassim El-Mouhajir, said late Wednesday via the agency.

The Bamako government and armed groups from northern Mali launched tough talks in Algiers on Wednesday for an elusive peace deal, with parts of the country still mired in conflict.

The closed-door negotiations were to take place in the presence of six rebel groups, but they refused to meet simultaneously, according to an Algerian official.

Tuareg rebels and the Malian government on Tuesday exchanged dozens of prisoners in a goodwill gesture on the eve of peace talks opening in Algiers, an Agence France Presse correspondent witnessed.

Forty-five Malian soldiers and police captured during clashes at the end of May in the west African nation's restive northeast arrived at Bamako's airport, where they were welcomed by Prime Minister Moussa Mara.