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All Passengers On China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 Flight Confirmed Dead
The plane crashed into a mountainside on Monday.
China has said all 132 of the passengers on board a China Eastern Airlines flight which crashed this week have died.
The plane plunged from more than 6,000m (20,000ft) on Monday, 21 March, and crashed into a mountainside near Wuzhou in Teng County, Guangxi province in China.
A recovery mission recovery confirmed it had found human remains at the site, and today, 26 March, state media in the country announced everyone on board has died.
A tweet from the China News Service read (translated): "After 6 days of full-scale search and rescue, the National Emergency Response Headquarters of the "3.21" China Eastern Airlines MU5735 aircraft flight accident confirmed on the evening of the 26th that all 123 passengers and 9 crew members on China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 were killed."
More than 300 rescue workers have been working at the site following the crash, while the cockpit voice recorder from the plane is being analysed in Beijing.
Much of the plane disintegrated on impact due to the force of the crash, meaning the recovered black box was 'badly damaged' when it was recovered from the wreckage.
Zhu Tao, an official at the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), said it could be decoded as the storage units were 'relatively complete', The Guardian reports.
A second black box which records flight data has not yet been found.
One man cited by China Youth Daily said his 26-year-old sister, her husband and their 18-month old daughter were on board the plane for their first-ever flight to travel to Guangazhou for medical treatment for the child. The family are said to have originally been scheduled on an earlier flight which had been cancelled.
Commenting on the loss, he said: "For the past two days, I felt like I had a dream, and I always felt that when I woke up the next day, my sister would call me. I didn't think it was real at all, first my grandfather died, and then I heard the news of the flight, and I just froze there and tried to reach my sister through the phone."
The reason for the crash remains a mystery to authorities, as airline and aviation officials have not discovered any faults with the plane or concerns regarding the flying conditions during the time of the journey.
The CAAC said the plane had passed all checks prior to take-off and flown the normal flight path through 'not dangerous' weather.
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Emily Brown