Indonesia ends search for remains of AirAsia crash victims

Indonesia has called off the search for the remaining victims of the AirAsia plane crash in the Java Sea, officials said yesterday.

All 162 people aboard the Airbus A320-200 died when it went down on December 28 while flying from Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, to Singapore. So far, 106 bodies have been recovered, with the last three pulled out from the underwater wreckage last week. Some bodies were found off Sulawesi, about 1,000km east of the crash site.

Tatang Zainudin, the operations director of the National Search and Rescue Agency, said the final retrieval operations ended on Tuesday night.

The main search and rescue operation had been called off on March 3, but small-scale efforts continued for two weeks at the request of the victims' families.

Zainudin said the agency planned to take family members to the crash site next week.

An Indonesian man whose daughter-in-law is among 56 people unaccounted for said his family had accepted the "sad reality" her body would never be found.

Hadi Widjaja, whose son and daughter-in-law were on the flight, praised rescuers for doing a "good job".