Seven more bodies retrieved from doomed AirAsia plane

Indonesian divers have retrieved seven more bodies from the AirAsia airplane that crashed late last year with 162 people on board, bringing the total number of the bodies recovered so far to 100.

Chief of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency Henry Bambang Soelistyo said on Saturday that divers recovered four bodies on Friday, including one from the aircraft’s cockpit.

Speaking to the local MetroTV network, Soelistyo stated that an additional three bodies were also recovered on Saturday.

The Airbus A320-200 passenger jet crashed into the Java Sea on December 28, 2014 while on a flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore, killing all those on board.

A number of the recovered bodies from the doomed Flight QZ8501 were located off Sulawesi Island, nearly 1,000 kilometers east of the original crash site.

More than 60 divers have been taking part in the search operation, which resumed on January 31 after several failed attempts to lift the plane’s fuselage from the seabed.

The Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics has declared that bad weather was the key factor behind the airliner’s crash, specifically pointing to icy conditions as the likely cause of the aircraft’s engine failure.

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