Seoul, Dec 30 (EFE).- South Korean authorities announced Monday that they had identified 140 of the 179 victims who lost their lives in the plane crash at Muan International Airport and a large majority have already been transferred to a temporary morgue.
“Once we are ready to transfer the bodies after the autopsies carried out by the investigation agencies, we will the families,” a South Korean official said in statements collected by South Korean news agency Yonhap.
The victims’ belongings are being collected from the runway and the area will be kept intact while waiting for the authorities to investigate the exact cause of the incident.
On Sunday, South Korean Jeju Air flight 7C2216 crashed after landing and skidding off the runway, killing 179 people and leaving only two survivors, making it the worst civil aviation disaster in the country’s history.
The incident occurred at about 9:03am (00:03 GMT), when the plane, a Boeing 737-800 that had departed hours earlier from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport in Thailand, landed without its landing gear deployed.
There were 181 people on board, six crew (pilot, co-pilot and four assistants) and 175 engers, of whom 173 were South Koreans, mostly people returning from family vacations, and two Thai nationals.
For the moment, the authorities, who are already investigating the crash, believe the cause of the incident could be the failure to deploy the landing gear and other braking mechanisms, possibly due to a bird strike.
The two black boxes were found hours after the incident, although South Korea’s transport ministry said the flight data recorder had been damaged, and that it could take between one and six months to decode it. EFE
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