Pieces of a Indonesian airliner with 102 people on board have been found in the ocean off Sulawesi island, officials said today.
Parts including a tail stabiliser and flight attendant seats were confirmed or reported found in the water and on beaches near the town of Pare Pare on the western Sulawesi coast. A woman's body was also recovered in the vicinity.
Relatives expressed relief they finally had firm news on the plane, even if it was not good, after a long wait and an erroneous report that it had crashed in the jungle and some people had survived.
The ill-fated Adam Air Boeing 737-400 was heading from Surabaya in Central Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather on Jan. 1.
Separately, a police official said the body of a woman, estimated to be in her 30s, had been recovered, although neither her identity nor whether she was a passenger on the Adam Air plane had been confirmed.
Pare Pare is about 150 kilometres south of Mamuju in west Sulawesi, which had been the hunt's main focus since Monday when Indonesian ships detected large metal objects on the sea bed.