People work in the French Foreign Affairs ministry's crisis center in Paris Friday, July 25, 2014, after a plane crashed in Mali. At least 116 people were killed in Thursdayís disaster, nearly half of whom were French. One of two black boxes was recovered from the wreckage in the Gossi region of Mali near the border with Burkina Faso, and was taken to the northern city of Gao, where a French contingent is based.

PARIS — French soldiers today secured one of the black boxes from the Air Algerie plane that went down in northern Mali with the loss of at least 116 people, French President Francois Hollande said. Terrorism has not been ruled out as a cause, although officials say the most likely cause is bad weather.

“There are, alas, no survivors,” Hollande said.

Nearly half of the passengers were French, many headed on to Europe.

The president has said that France will spare no efforts to uncover the cause of the crash.

“There are hypotheses, notably weather-related, but we don’t rule out anything because we want to know what happened,” Hollande said.

“What we know is that the debris is concentrated in a limited space, but it is too soon to draw conclusions,” he added.

The aircraft, owned by Swiftair and leased by Algeria’s flagship carrier, disappeared from radar less than an hour after it took off early Thursday.