amotamar.net google news - Cairo - An investigation opened Sunday hours after a helicopter crash in Egypt that killed eight French soldiers and another foreign peacekeeper.
A source in the Egyptian Ministry of Civil Aviation said Egypt would cooperate cooperate in the probe into how the UN observer mission helicopter crashed in the Sinai Peninsula.
Three charred bodies were found and the other six soldiers on board were missing presumed dead, flight authorities in Cairo said.
All belonged to UN peacekeeping forces. Pan-Arab news reports said they were on a training mission.
Al-Jazeera network said that the non-French victim was Canadian, but this was not immediately confirmed by official sources.
The aircraft took off from al-Gura airport in Sinai and was heading south to St Catherine. Ministry sources said that around 10 kilometres away from al-Gura, at 6:15 GMT, the aircraft crashed into a mountain.
Ihab Mohie, press spokesman for the Egyptian Aviation Company and a senior flight officer in the surveillance section, said they received an emergency signal around the time of the crash.
He also said that there was 'unconfirmed information' saying that the same aircraft collided with a Jordanian food tanker on a nearby road before hitting the mountain.
Some local news channels said the helicopter crashed into the mountain and then fell onto the tanker; others said it hit the food container first, and then the mountain.
The UN observer mission has been stationed in Sinai since 1982.