Wreckage of Indonesian military plane found; Indian passenger identified

Jakarta: Search parties have spotted the wreckage of an Indonesian Air Force plane that crashed in a mountainous region of West Java.
According to Indonesia's MetroTV all 18 people aboard the plane were killed.
Air Force spokesman Chaerudin Ray told The Straits Times that a Singaporean, Mr Tan Hong King, was with two of his colleagues to test aerial cameras on the Casa N212 aircraft.
The other two foreigners were identified as Mr Mahendra Kumar, an Indian national, and Mr Kwong Ping Anthony of Britain. All three worked for IT firm Credent Technology (Asia Pacific) in Singapore.
Also aboard were seven Indonesian military personnel from the air force's mapping division, three Indonesian civilians from local firm Avio Gaya Perkasa, and five crew members.
Search parties found the wreckage of the 24-year-old aircraft in Curug Nangka near Gunung Malang yesterday afternoon but were unable to get close to it because of the thick jungle terrain.
Villagers who joined the search parties told local station TVOne that they saw bodies near the aircraft but no survivors.
The CasaN212 took off from Halim Perdana Kusumah air base in Jakarta at 9.23am on Thursday to test some digital mapping camera equipment. The aircraft went missing an hour after takeoff.
A security guard at the Curug Nangka camping site in Tamansari, Bogor, said that villagers heard a loud explosion above the forest at about 11.30am on Thursday.
Thursday's crash was the third involving an aircraft belonging to the Indonesian Armed Forces in six months.
28/06/08 Salim Osman/Straits Times, Singapore

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Categories: Foreign Jun 2008, Safety Jun 2008