A search
vessel looking for the remains of victims of the EgyptAir plane that crashed
into the Mediterranean in May has recovered all of the mapped bodies from the
sea floor, investigators say.
The
Mauritian-based ship John Lethbridge is now sailing to Alexandria in Egypt.
It will
later return to the crash site to look for more bodies.
The flight
from Paris to Cairo crashed on May 19 killing all 66 on board. The cause of the
crash remains unknown.
A
statement by the Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee said that
the search vessel John Lethbridge “retrieved all the human remains that were
mapped at the crash location”.
It said
Egyptian and French forensic doctors on board the vessel oversaw the body
recovery process, reports the BBC.
The
remains are due to be examined by prosecutors and forensic specialists in
Alexandria before going to Cairo for DNA analysis.
The
committee said on Saturday that the memory chips from the airliner’s black box
voice recorders are not damaged and investigators should be able to make use of
them.
The black
box from EgyptAir flight MS804 confirmed smoke was on board, Egyptian
investigators said last week.
Automated
electronic messages sent by the plane revealed that smoke detectors went off in
a toilet and in the avionics area below the cockpit, minutes before the plane
disappeared.
The
recorded data are consistent with those messages, investigators said.
The voice
and flight data recorders were recovered from a depth of about 3,000m (9,800ft)
in the Mediterranean.
The second
black box, the cockpit recorder, is still being repaired in Paris.
No
explanation for the disaster has so far been dismissed, but experts are
reported by the Reuters news agency to be tending towards the theory that the
cause of the crash was a technical failure rather than sabotage.
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