Relatives of 116 people killed in an Air Algerie crash in July visited the scene of the disaster in remote hazardous northern Mali on Tuesday under tight military guard.

Soldiers were on patrol and armoured vehicles were parked in the background as relatives walked between a handful of sand-coloured tents to a monument erected to the victims of Flight AH5017.

Burkina Faso authorities investigating the assassination of former president Thomas Sankara during a 1987 coup have sealed his tomb ahead of attempting to identify the remains of the late leader, a lawyer for his family told Agence France Presse on Friday.

A magistrate from a military court ordered "placing seals on 12 tombs" of Sankara and 11 other people, mostly members of the military who died at the same time, the lawyer, Benewende Sankara, said.

Burkina Faso authorities plan to cross into Mali and Niger to hunt the kidnappers of a Romanian mineworker seized in the far north of the west African nation, a minister said on Sunday.

The security officer was taken on Saturday when five armed men attacked the manganese mine in Tambao, 350 kilometers (220 miles) northeast of the capital, Ouagadougou.

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.

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."