Indonesian Rescue Team Now Denies Finding AirAsia Victim in Life Jacket

Indonesian authorities have denied earlier news reports that the body of one of the AirAsia victims it recovered in the Java Sea was wearing a life jacket; the rescuers confirmed that one more body was found, but insist that the life vest was floating separatel

MOSCOW, December 31 (Sputnik)  — The Indonesian search and rescue team has refuted an earlier report that the recovered body of one of the victims of the ill-fated Air Asia flight was found wearing a life jacket.

“A victim was found, a man and a lifejacket. They were found separately, the body was not wearing a lifejacket,” MalayMail Online quotes Major General Tatang Zaenuddin, the operations deputy for the Indonesian Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) as saying.

Earlier on Wednesday, reports suggested that one more plane crash victim's body was recovered wearing a life jacket, which raised questions about the flight’s last minutes.

Seven bodies have been recovered from the sea. One of them appears to be that of a uniformed flight attendant.

Indonesian search and rescue officials are believed to have honed in on the remains of the missing AirAsia Flight QZ8501 plane using sonar imaging showing the fuselage, lying upside down, at the bottom of the Java Sea.

The plane is said to be in the Karimata Strait, in the Java Sea off the coast of Borneo, lying at a depth of 24-30 meters (78-98 feet).

AirAsia QZ8501 went missing on Sunday with 162 passengers on board, most of them Indonesian nationals. The Airbus A320-200 flight was traveling from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore, vanishing in bad weather.