FIVE BODIES STILL belted to their seats have been discovered by divers near the main section of an AirAsia plane that crashed into the Java Sea last month.

There were 162 people on board the plane and a total of 58 bodies have now been found following the crash of flight QZ8501 which went down on December 28 in stormy weather.

The flight was travelling from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

“Our divers found five bodies buried in mud, close to the plane fuselage. They were still belted to their seats,” S.B. Supriyadi, a rescue agency official coordinating the search, told AFP.

Divers are hoping to reach the plane’s fuselage today.

Bodies

“We believe they spilled out of the fuselage, which is 50 to 100 metres away,” he said.

Three bodies have been retrieved and taken to the warship Banda Aceh, while the other two were still being recovered, he said.

Yesterday, investigators said that recordings from the plane’s black box revealed that the warning alarms were “screaming” just before the crash.

The pilot’s voices were drowned out by the alarms, said investigators.

Indonesian Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan said that the plane had climbed abnormally fast before stalling and plunging into the sea, during a flight on December 28 in stormy weather from Indonesia’s Surabaya to Singapore.

“In the final minutes, the plane climbed at a speed which was beyond normal,” the minister told reporters.

- © AFP 2015

Read: AirAsia black box records warning alarms “screaming” before crash>

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