Egypt ? A plane carrying foreign peacekeepers across the Sinai desert crashed Sunday near a stretch of highway where it had tried to make an emergency landing, killing eight French soldiers and a Canadian, officials said.

Capt. Mohammed Badr, a police officer in Sinai, said the plane went down 50 miles from the nearest major town, el-Nakhl.

It appeared the Canadian-made DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter tried to land on the mountain highway but clipped a truck and crashed nearby, said Normand St. Pierre, a spokesman for the Multinational Force and Observers, an independent force created by Egypt and Israel to monitor their border in the Sinai after a 1979 peace deal.

The crash wiped out more than half of the 15-member French contingent and destroyed the mission’s sole fixed-wing aircraft, St. Pierre said. The aircraft was on a training mission and carried a “higher than normal” load of passengers and crew. The truck driver escaped unharmed.

“The French government will have to decide whether it wants to rebuild the unit and send in a new plane,” St. Pierre said. “It’s a great loss. Everyone is shocked. We can do a lot with helicopters in the meantime, but we can’t reconstitute the unit.”