China steps up search for crash victims’ bodies
Recovery teams have deployed drones and thermal imaging equipment across a mountainous area where a China Eastern plane inexplicably crashed with 132 people on board.
Days after flight MU5735 ploughed into rugged terrain near Wuzhou in southern China, officials are still yet to declare all of the 123 passengers and nine crew members dead.
More human remains have been found, officials confirmed, but the velocity of a crash – which punched a crater into the muddy ground and scattered plane parts and passenger belongings across a wide area – has complicated the recovery work.
“Most of the aircraft wreckage is concentrated in a core area within a radius of about 30m from the main impact point,” Zhu Tao of China’s aviation authority told reporters.
“The depth extends down from the surface to about 20m.”
Monday’s crash is almost certainly China’s worst air disaster in three decades and President Xi Jinping was swift to order a full inquiry into what happened.
At the same time, teams are scouring the landscape for the remaining black box, after a damaged voice recorder was recovered on Wednesday.
Experts hope it will yield clues to the cause of the crash, in which the plane mysteriously plunged nose-first into the ground.