JAKARTA — Indonesia will end its search for the bodies of 56 people missing from an AirAsia jet that crashed in the Java Sea in December, a national rescue agency official said.
AirAsia flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control during bad weather less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore on Dec. 28. All 162 people on board the Airbus A320 died.
"Some of our ships and personnel have been pulled back already and some remain on standby, but officially the operation will be finished on Sunday," Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for the search and rescue agency, told Reuters.
The flight data and cockpit voice recorders — known as "black boxes" — were recovered two weeks after the crash. Large pieces of the fuselage were also found on the sea floor. Few details of the analysis of the flight recorders have been made public.
A multinational rescue effort, led by the Indonesian military and often hampered by bad weather and strong currents, recovered 106 bodies, with 56 unaccounted for.
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