By Ainur Rohmah
JAKARTA
Indonesia navy divers have retrieved six more bodies from an area containing parts of the sunken fuselage of AirAsia QZ8501.
Local media reported the director of operations for the country's National Search and Rescue Agency as saying Thursday that the bodies had been found on the sea floor in an area dotted with wreckage from the flight which plunged into the Java Sea on Dec. 28 last year.
"The six bodies [2 adult men and 4 women] were squeezed between fragments of the aircraft and buried in the mud," said Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi.
He added that the search team had also found some "windows, seats and floor" from the plane's fuselage which had been lifted onto the navy ship KRI Banda Aceh.
Rear Admiral Widodo, commander of the navy's western fleet, told reporters aboard the warship that the corpses had been found clothed at a depth of around 30 meters, many still with personal property in their pockets such as identity cards.
For the last week, divers have battled strong currents and rough seas to reach what is thought to be the plane's main body.
The object was spotted on the seabed and is thought to contain the 103 remaining passengers and crew. So far 59 bodies have been recovered.
Detik.com reported Supriyadi as saying Thursday that the search team had lost the position of a large piece of the fuselage because most of the buoys marking the spot had gone missing.
"They [the SAR team] lost track of the main body. Seven of eight buoys are missing, one indicating the position of the left wing," he said.
"Divers are already circling the site today but have not found the body of the plane."
AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crashed into the Java Sea off the Indonesian island of Borneo killing all 162 people on board as it flew from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore.
Investigators are analyzing data from the aircraft's two ‘black box’ flight recorders to determine why it crashed. Terrorism has been ruled unlikely.
On Tuesday, Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan said the flight had climbed at a rate outside the Airbus A320-200’s safety parameters immediately before it disappeared from radar.
The last contact with air traffic controllers was when the pilot asked to climb from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet to avoid storm clouds. The flight was denied immediate permission due to heavy air traffic in the area and four minutes later the plane disappeared.
