Searchers found the fuselage of AirAsia flight 8501 on Wednesday, and divers began scouring the wreckage Thursday in the hopes of finding more bodies.
Singapore Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen announced the
discovery in the Java Sea, and told USA Today images taken remotely showed words on the fuselage to confirm that it was Flight 8501.
"The accident is a tragic event resulting in the loss of many lives," Ng told the newspaper. "I hope that with the fuselage located, some form of closure can come to the families of the victims to ease their grief."
The flight went down on Dec. 28, 2014, and all 162 people aboard are presumed dead.
BBC reported that many bodies have been found, but many others were believed to be trapped in the fuselage.
SB Supriyadi, an official coordinating the search, told the BBC that raising the fuselage would be difficult.
"If it is not too heavy, we may lift the whole piece and evacuate the victims," Supriyadi said. "If it's too heavy, we may then swim into the fuselage and pull out the bodies one by one before lifting it."
Both of the flight's black boxes, or data recorders, have already been recovered, and officials are hoping to determine the cause of the crash from the information on the boxes.
The Associated Press reported that bad weather Thursday was making a search of the fuselage difficult, but that at least 15 divers were attempting to recover bodies.
An unauthenticated voice recording that is presented as the raw recording of the pilots' last minutes taken from the AirAsia black box was posted on YouTube Thursday. It was posted by Top News, which is registered to Turner Broadcasting, which owns CNN. The source of the recording has not been verified.
In it, listeners can hear one pilot yelling, "Allahu Akbar," which online sources said translates to "God is greater" or "God is great."
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