BY ESTHER HTUSAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jun 8, 2017
 |
| AP Photo/Esther Htusan |
SAN HLAN, Myanmar
(AP) -- Fishermen joined navy and air force personnel Thursday in recovering
bodies and aircraft parts from the sea off Myanmar, where a military plane
carrying 122 people including 15 children crashed a day earlier, officials
said.
The four-engine
Chinese-made Y-8 turboprop aircraft had left Myeik, also known as Mergui,
heading for Yangon on a route over the Andaman Sea. It was raining, but not
heavily, at the time contact was lost with it at 1:35 p.m. Wednesday, when it
was southwest of the city of Dawei, formerly known as Tavoy.
The military
announced that the bodies of 29 people had been recovered by late Thursday
afternoon - 20 women, eight children and one man. In many cases, the bodies
were not recovered whole, said a military officer involved in the recovery
operation.
More than 1,000
people, including volunteers from dozens of community mutual aid societies with
their vehicles, gathered on the beach at San Hlan village in Laung Lone
township, which served as a landing point for recovery operations.
The bodies, fetched
from the sea and taken aboard large fishing vessels and navy ships, had been
transferred to smaller boats which hauled them into shallow water at the beach,
where soldiers put the body bags on stretchers and carried them to waiting
trucks. The process had been delayed for several hours by heavy rain and choppy
seas.
Local fishermen
joined nine navy ships, five military aircraft and three helicopters in the
search, military spokesman Gen. Myat Min Oo said. One of the first finds by the
searchers was of two life jackets, bodies and an aircraft wheel in the sea west
of Laung Lone, he announced earlier.
The plane carried
108 passengers - mostly military personnel and their families - and 14 crew
members, according to an announcement on the Facebook page of military Senior
Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, which originally gave slightly lower numbers. Fifteen of
the passengers were children. It is not unusual for such flights to carry
civilians to offset transportation costs for military families stationed in the
somewhat remote south.
The Facebook page,
the main source of official information about the crash, said the plane,
carrying about 2.4 tons of cargo in addition to the 122 people aboard, was
received in March last year and since then had logged 809 flying hours. It said
the pilot and co-pilot both had more than 3,100 hours of flying experience.
The area is about
440 miles (700 kilometers) north of the last primary radar contact with
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished on a flight from Malaysia to
Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. That plane is believed to
have flown far off course and crashed into a remote area of the southern Indian
Ocean.