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Roundup: Indonesian rescuers recover more bodies from wreckage of AirAsia plane

Xinhua, February 4, 2015 Adjust font size:

Without the presence of the military, Indonesian rescuers managed to recover 13 more bodies from the wreckages of the crashed AirAsia flight QZ8501 that lies 30 meters below the sea surface in Java Sea, making body count from the calamity reaches 90.

Those bodies were recovered by divers from Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) in the extended search operation that commenced since Saturday. "Today we recover and evacuate six bodies. If added by the ones we recovered yesterday, the total count was 13,"BASARNAS Operational Director Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi said in the operation base Pangkalan Bun on Tuesday.

According to Supriyadi, those bodies were taken from inside the fuselage and beneath the wreckages. They were found through search operation carried out by divers from the BASARNAS and divers from Indonesia's oil and gas regulator agency of SKK Migas.

The BASARNAS previously estimated that many of passengers' bodies were still trapped in the wreckage of the ill-fated plane. Besides rechecking the wreckage of the plane, the extended search operation would also search for other parts in a bid to find more bodies.

The aim of the extended search operation was to find and retrieve bodies of passengers, BASARNAS Chairman F. Henry Bambang Soelistyo said last week, adding the operation would probably last for a week.

Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) has submitted the preliminary report after an investigation into the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) of the crashed plane last week.

The FDR and CVR were recovered by Indonesian rescuers on Jan. 12 and 13 in the crash location.

Citing results of its investigation, Mardjono Siswosumarno, a senior investigator at the NTSC, said that AirAsia flight QZ8501 was under the control of the co-pilot when the crash took place on Dec.28 while the captain pilot acted as the monitoring pilot.

The plane went down in the morning after losing contact at 6.18 a.m. western Indonesian time. The Singapore-bound plane was on its way to Singapore from Indonesian city of Surabaya, boarded by 162 people. A multinational operation to search the plane joined by Indonesia, Australia, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, Russia and China was underway since then.

After a month, several bodies, body parts, debris and belongings of flight QZ8501 passengers were recovered by fishermen and rescuers in Majene waters located around 1,000 kilometers away from the crash site.

As of Wednesday, Indonesian agency of Disaster Victim Investigation (DVI) managed to identify 68 bodies from total bodies sent to the crisis center in Surabaya. After being identified, those bodies were sent to their families for burial. Endi