All 132 China plane crash victims identified through DNA tests: Official

ISTANBUL

All 132 victims of last week’s plane crash in China have been identified through DNA testing, an official announced on Monday.

“Search teams will now focus entirely on identifying the victims’ belongings and recovering wreckage,” Zhu Tao, an official of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said at a news conference in Nanning, capital of the southeastern Guangxi region.

A Boeing 737-800 plane of China Eastern Airlines with 123 passengers and nine crew members crashed in a mountainous area in Guangxi on March 21.

The flight was heading from the southeastern city of Kunming to Guangzhou, a port city near Hong Kong.

President Xi Jinping led a moment of silence for the victims before a meeting of the top body of China’s ruling party on Monday.

Search operations at the crash site – a hilly and forested area outside the city of Wuzhou – have been difficult due to ongoing rainfall.

Teams have been using pumps to drain water from the site.

Both of the plane’s black boxes have already been found but one of them was “badly damaged.”

“The decoding analysis for the recovered two black boxes is underway,” said Zhu.

Search teams have found some 36,000 pieces of wreckage at the site, according to officials.

Chinese authorities confirmed late on Saturday that there were no survivors in the crash.

The weather was not hazardous at the time of the accident and the flight had normal communication with air traffic control until its sudden fall, according to authorities.

The plane itself was in proper flying state and the pilots too were in good health, an official of China Eastern Airlines earlier said.