Lion Air Crash: Remains of 10 victims found, search area widens

Recovered personal items of passengers on board the flight. Pic/AFP

Indonesian search and rescue teams on Tuesday widened the search area as they looked for the fuselage, black boxes and victims of the Lion Air plane that crashed in the Java Sea a day earlier with 189 people on board.

An Indonesian official said that the remains of at least 10 people were retrieved and only fragments of the plane were found. Flight JT 610 went down on Monday 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang on the Indonesian island of Bangka.

There was no indication yet of what caused the plane to go down. Didi Hamzar, director of preparedness, Indonesian Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas), said that the search radius from the suspected crash site now extended to 10 nautical miles (18.5 km) compared to Monday's 5 nautical miles. The plane is believed to have plunged into the water, about 8 km east of Cape Tanjung Karawang, in the eastern part of Jakarta Bay.

More than 100 rescue personnel were searching the area with 35 boats, a total of 50 divers and with the help of remote controlled underwater sonar technology that tracks the sea floor up to the depth of 30 to 60 metres.

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