No Survivors In Guangxi Crash, Officials Confirm

Mainland officials confirmed late on Saturday that all 132 passengers and crew on a China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed this week had died.

Flight MU5735 was travelling from the southwestern city of Kunming to Guangzhou when the Boeing 737-800 fell sharply from its cruising altitude to crash in a heavily forested area of Guangxi.

There had been little hope of finding any survivors. Speaking to reporters on Saturday night, Hu Zhenjiang, deputy director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), confirmed that there were no signs of life from the crash site and all 123 passengers and 9 crew members had been killed, state media said.

Earlier, regional officials in Guangxi said they'd found no evidence of explosives at the site of Monday's crash, while they've so far managed to confirm the identify 120 of the 132 people on board.

"A physics and chemistry laboratory of the public security authorities has finished the testing of 41 samples out of 66 from the crash site and no major ion components of common inorganic explosives or common organic explosives have been identified," said Zheng Xi, head of the region's fire and rescue authority.

Emergency officials said samples taken from the site had helped to identify 114 passengers and six crew members onboard.

Meanwhile Zhu Tao, director of the Aviation Safety Office of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said officials found an emergency location transmitter from the plane that had been close to where the flight data recorder, one of the planes two black boxes, had been installed, though the recorder has still not been found.

Another black box, the cockpit voice recorder, has been recovered and sent to Beijing for examination. (RTHK/Reuters)

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