Official says Indonesian plane was 'totally destroyed,' no one survived crash


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Rescuers have recovered nearly all the bodies of the 54 people on board the Trigana Air Service plane that went down in a mountainous region of Indonesia Sunday.
"The plane was totally destroyed and all the bodies were burned and difficult to identify," Bambang Soelistyo, head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, told The Associated Press. "There is no chance anyone survived." The plane disappeared during bad weather a few minutes before it was scheduled to land in the city of Oksibil. A search plane spotted the wreckage in the Bintang Mountains district of the Papua province, and rescue crews arrived at the location Tuesday morning. Soelistyo said the wreckage was at an altitude of 2,600 meters, and rescuers had to overcome intense weather and rugged terrain to get to the crash site.
Officials said they have also found the black box, and the bodies will be sent to the capital of Papua province, Jayapura, for identification. The airline's crisis center spokesperson said all of the passengers were Indonesian, and included two members of the local parliament and three local government officials.
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A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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