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." Capt. Ihab Moheildin, the air control officer at Cairo International Airport, said the airport lost contact with the plane after receiving a distress signal, indicating a possible mechanical failure.