Workers using blowtorches began yesterday to clear away the gutted wreckage of an Indonesian airliner that crash-landed in Indonesia killing 21 people.
About two dozen men from the Garuda Indonesia airline and the airforce cut the burnt-out fuselage into pieces that will be stored in a nearby hangar, the Detikcom online news portal said.
The area was cordoned off by a police line and no one was allowed to approach the disaster site, a rice field just outside of Jogjakarta airport.
Forensic experts on Saturday managed to identify all the dead from the accident, including five Australians -- four embassy staff and one Jakarta-based journalist.
Early information suggested that the plane's front wheel had snapped on landing, sending it off the end of the runway and into a rice field.
Both engines were ripped off and the right wing broke, igniting a fire.
The aircraft's pilots have been suspended, and the Kompas newspaper quoted the head of the National Transport Safety Committee's probe team, Mardjono, as saying that they were now able to be questioned.
Meanwhile, Australian air accident investigators said yesterday they had been unable to analyse the cockpit voice recorder of the passenger plane and were sending it away for further tests.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said it had exhausted "all normal specialist recovery techniques" to download information from the cockpit voice recorder (CVR).
However, the bureau said it had been able to read the flight data recorder, which along with the CVR comprises the black box data storage device that all planes are required to carry.
The black box recorders were delivered to the bureau on Friday, but its acting deputy director Joe Hattley said that despite "trying everything," it had been unable to access data on the cockpit voice recorder.
ATSB executive director Kym Bills said that investigators had been working together with the recorder's US-based manufacturer, Honeywell, through the weekend to crack the CVR.
Meanwhile, aid from relief agencies reached victims of the deadly earthquake on Sumatra as authorities yesterday revised the death toll down from 73 to 66.
A total of 688 people were still being treated in hospital for injuries, 571 of them suffering from serious injuries.
A joint humanitarian aid project by Mercy Corps, Save the Children and Care distributed tents and tool kits to refugees.
Asril, the head of the Kubung subdistrict, said: "What we lack are blankets, as the evenings here can be quite cold, and milk for infants of over six months."
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