Rescue teams find human remains at the Chinese plane crash site

A day after finding one of the black boxes of the crashed China Eastern jet, the rescue teams have found human remains at the site.

The China Eastern Airlines flight on board 132 people crashed on Monday afternoon, after plunging from more than 6,000m (20,000ft).

The cause of the disaster is yet to be ascertained as officials scramble for clues to find what made the passenger plane enter a near-vertical dive in southern China.

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The black box, which records flight data, was found damaged on the outside, but its internal records appeared to be fine, aviation officials said. A second black box has not yet been found.

Zhu Tao, an official at the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), said the storage units ofthe recovered recorder were damaged but “relatively complete” and had been sent to a Beijing institute to analyse its data.

The rescue teams found the first black box with great difficulty on Wednesday as heavy rains flooded the steep and rugged landscape of the crash site in Wuzhou.

So far, hundreds of rescuers and volunteers had managed to find the scattered plane debris and the charred remains of personal belongings.

On Wednesday, dozens of family members of the plane crash victims arrived at the scene.

One man told Reuters his nephew had been a passenger on the flight. He and his son had driven five hours from neighbouring Shenzhen province in the hopes of being able to find their relative alive.

"I plan to stay until the matter is sorted and I can take his ashes back. But this depends on the work of authorities,” he was quoted as saying.

"I hope the country can thoroughly investigate this matter and find out whether it is the manufacturer's fault or a maintenance problem," he added.

Even though no survivors have been found, rescuers said they were not giving up.

"We are still using manpower and equipment for the search and expand the scope of search as much as possible to search for trapped people and survivors. We are trying our best to search for the trapped," said Huang Shangwu, deputy director of the combat training department of the Guangxi Fire and Rescue Brigade.

"Following the instructions of the command headquarters, we the fire rescue team is mainly conducting the task of searching for lives. Therefore we are using thermographic cameras and life detectors to conduct search on the ground and heat search. But because of the rainfall these days, the search signal of our equipment is pretty weak," Huang said.

Watch |Crashed Chinese plane's black box found

(With inputs from agencies)