Nine foreign peacekeepers, including French and Canadian soldiers, were killed Sunday when a French plane attached to the Sinai's multinational peacekeeping force crashed in a remote, mountainous area of the desert, the force's spokesman and police said. Force spokesman Normand St. Pierre said as many as eight of the dead were French, but did not have exact figures. He said a «higher than normal» load of passengers and crew were aboard the aircraft at the time of the crash because it was on a training mission. Capt. Mohammed Badr, a police officer in Sinai, said the nine who were killed included a mix of French and Canadian soldiers, but could not provide an exact breakdown. He said one of the plane's wings hit a car on its way down, but the driver escaped unharmed. The crash occurred in the middle of the vast Sinai Peninsula near the village of el-Thamad, about 80 kilometers southeast of a town called Nakhl, said Badr. Ahmed Fadhel, the press officer at the French Embassy in Cairo, had no immediate comment. The Defense Ministry in Paris also had no immediate comment, the Associated Press reported.
