US investigators were finishing their search yesterday on the Pacific island of Guam for clues to the cause of the South Korean aircraft disaster.
The analysis of data collected from the site within hours of the August 6th disaster which claimed 226 lives will now be carried out at federal facilities in the United States, Mr George Black of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said.
"Our operation is winding down," he told a briefing in Agana, Guam, adding that the recovery of bodies trapped from among the wreckage on a ravine was also nearly complete with 203 accounted for so far.
South Korean journalists in Guam said that six of the identified fatalities would be released to relatives and flown home to Seoul early today, but neither the South Korean consulate, the airline, nor US military authorities on the island could confirm this.
Mr Black said the investigating team had not reached any immediate conclusions on what caused last Wednesday's accident, when the Boeing 747-300 aircraft en route to Agana from Seoul with 254 people on board crashed into a ravine just short of the airport runway. The accident happened during a rainstorm.
Earlier, the NTSB had said that it would take them up to a year to establish the cause of the crash. The investigators said on Sunday that the Guam airport's radar minimum safe altitude warning system had not been working.
While they made it clear this did not cause the accident, it could have "made the difference".
Of the 29 initial survivors, one - a 10-year-old Chinese-American - died yesterday at a Texas military hospital, where she was being treated for severe burns.