Indonesian authorities said on Sunday that they have found the location where they believe a Boeing 737 passenger plane crashed into the sea a day after the jet with 62 people onboard lost contact with air traffic controllers following take off from Indonesia’s capital at 13:56 (7.56 CET) local time.
The Sriwijaya Air jet with 52 passengers and 6 crew members disappeared from radar four minutes into its journey to Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan province on Indonesia’s Borneo island.
Read: Amazon and Apple remove Parler – an alternative to Facebook and Twitter
The plane lost more than 10,000 feet of altitude in less than a minute, reported flight tracker website FlightRadar24.
Indonesian divers on Sunday located parts of the wreckage of a Boeing 737-500 at a depth of 75 feet in the Java Sea.
Indonesian rescuers pulled out body parts, pieces of clothing, and scraps of metal from the Java Sea early Sunday morning.
“We received reports from the diver team that the visibility in the water is good and clear, allowing the discovery of some parts of the plane,” Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto said in a statement. “We are sure that is the point where the plane crashed.”
More than 10 ships have now been deployed to the site with navy divers.
“We have detected signals in two points, this could be the black box,” the chief of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, Bagus Puruhito, said.
A spokesman for the Jakarta police, Yusri Yunus, said two bags had been received from the search and rescue agency.
“The first bag contained passengers’ properties, another bag contained body parts,” he told reporters, adding: “We are still identifying these findings.”
A plane flying from Jakarta to Pontianak would spend most of the flight time over the Java Sea.
Fishermen in the area around Thousand Islands, a chain of islands north of Jakarta’s coast, reported hearing an explosion around 2:30 p.m. Saturday.
“We heard something explode, we thought it was a bomb or a tsunami since after that we saw the big splash from the water,” fisherman Solihin, who goes by one name, told The Associated Press by phone.
“It was raining heavily and the weather was so bad. So it is difficult to see around clearly. But we can see the splash and a big wave after the sounds. We were very shocked and directly saw the plane debris and the fuel around our boat.”
By Ifunanya Ikueze
