Rescuers have found fragments of human hair and scalp that might have from passengers on a missing Indonesian airliner, a rescue official said on Sunday.
BARRU (Indonesia): Rescuers have found fragments of human hair and scalp that might come from passengers on a missing Indonesian airliner, a rescue official said on Sunday. The remains will be sent for DNA testing, said Muslimin, a rescue official in Makassar.
Pieces of wreckage of the Adam Air Boeing 737-400 that vanished from radar screens on New Year's Day with 102 people aboard have been found in the past few days floating in the sea or washed up on beaches off Sulawesi Island.
Officials have suggested the plane might have crashed into the sea off the west coast of Sulawesi, disintegrating into small pieces.
Makassar, Sulawesi's largest city and the coordinating point for the search, is about 1,400 km (870 miles) northeast of Jakarta. Pare Pare is a two-hour drive north from Makassar. Both are on Sulawesi's west coast.
A search team found part of one of the plane's wings on Saturday night, Budi Haryoto, an official from the national search and rescue agency said. He said the 1.5 metres (5 ft) long fragment was still being examined to find out if it was part of the right or left wing.
A fisherman found the tail stabiliser of the Boeing on Tuesday snared in his nets but initially stored it under his traditional stilted house because he thought it was only a slab of plywood. He was given a cash reward of 50 million rupiah ($5,500) on Saturday for finding the first piece of the missing jet.
A part of a passenger seat, with its serial number, was found on Sunday around Pasir Putih Island, roughly half way between Pare Pare and Makassar, told Lieutenant Andi Ichsan, an Indonesian marine involved in the search.
Troops in a rubber boat also found a piece of an emergency exit door off Sakuala Island in Pangkep district, he said.
Despite the possibility that the Boeing had broken up, Indonesian navy ships assisted by a United States (US) oceanographic ship have been trying to locate its fuselage, which could still house the flight recorder that could provide clues to explain the disaster.
Search mission chief First Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto said on Saturday that the search for the plane's main body and black box was being hampered by the depth of the sea in areas where metal objects had been detected in the Makassar Strait.
Strong winds and heavy seas were also making the search more difficult at the weekend.
The flight recorder is set up to give off a signal for 30 days to aid detection, but it is likely to be very hard to locate in waters as deep as 1,700 metres (5,600 ft) in the area. So far no bodies confirmed as the missing passengers have been found.
Suyanto said previously that, considering that parts of the plane found so far were mostly small, a body was unlikely to have survived the disaster in one piece. The 17-year-old plane was heading from Surabaya in East Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather.
The plane made no distress call, although the pilot had reported concerns over crosswinds.
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