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| Rescuers have recovered body parts and pieces of the plane's engines, wheels and seats from the sea (AFP Photo/Adek BERRY) |
Indonesia on Saturday called off the search for passengers of a Lion Air plane, almost two weeks after the jetliner plunged into the Java Sea killing 189 people on board.
Some 196
bags containing body parts have been recovered from under the water with 79
victims identified and handed over to their families for burial.
"Since
yesterday afternoon until today we have not found any more victims and
therefore I declare the search and rescue operation is over," Muhammad
Syaugi, head of the search and rescue agency, told reporters Saturday.
"We
apologise to the public, especially the families of victims if during the
operation we were not able to satisfy everybody," he added.
Rescuers
have also retrieved parts of the plane's engines, wheels and seats from the
sea. One diver died helping with search.
Lion Air
has begun paying $102,058 compensation money for each passenger to the grieving
families.
Indonesian
National Transportation Safety Committee has retrieved one of the black boxes
-- the flight data recorder -- and is still hunting for the cockpit voice
recorder, which recorded the last conversation between the pilot and co-pilot
before the crash.
The doomed
jet was a Boeing 737-Max 8, one of the world's newest and most advanced
commercial passenger planes, and there is still no answer as to what caused the
crash.
The
government has ordered a check on all Boeing 737-Max 8 fleets and conducted a
special audit on Lion Air management.
The
transportation ministry has also removed several executives and technical staff
from the airline to help with the accident investigation.
The Lion
Air plane plunged into the Java Sea on October 29 minutes after takeoff from
Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang city.
All 189
people on board were killed and the data from the flight recorder data has so
far revealed the plane's air speed indicator had not been working properly on
its last four journeys, including on the fatal flight.
Following
the fatal crash, Boeing issued a special bulletin on how to deal with the
erroneous Angle of Attack sensor alert in 737-8 and -9 airplanes.
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