Wreckage of Indonesian airliner found at sea

MAKASSAR, Indonesia, Jan 11 (Reuters) Pieces of a Indonesian airliner with 102 people on board have been found in the ocean off Sulawesi island, officials said today, after a painstaking 10-day search for the plane from jungles to stormy seas.

Parts including a tail stabiliser and flight attendant seats were confirmed or reported found in the water and on beaches near the town of Pare Pare on the western Sulawesi coast. A woman's body was also recovered in the vicinity.

Relatives expressed relief they finally had firm news on the plane, even if it was not good, after a long wait and an erroneous report that it had crashed in the jungle and some people had survived.

The ill-fated Adam Air Boeing 737-400 was heading from Surabaya in Central Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather on January 1.

''This morning I announced that there has been a finding of a part of Adam Air. What was found was the right tail's stabiliser number 65C25746-76. This thing was found by a fisherman in Pare Pare,'' said Eddy Suyanto, who has been coordinating search efforts from an air base in the South Sulawesi capital, Makassar.

''This object has the same number as the Boeing catalogue,'' he told reporters, displaying the slightly scratched white stabiliser found yesterday.

Separately, a police official told Reuters the body of a woman, estimated to be in her 30s, had been recovered, although neither her identity nor whether she was a passenger on the Adam Air plane had been confirmed.

''She had short black hair. She wore green attire, long brown trousers. She had typical dark Asian skin,'' Simon Benteng said by telephone from Pare Pare, about 100 km north of Makassar.

Two flight attendant seats were also found on a beach today in the same general area, search and rescue official Immal Yuhani told Reuters. Elshinta news radio said fishermen had discovered a life vest wrapper 10 km from the stabiliser's location.

Two truckloads of soldiers were deployed to Pare Pare to help comb the beaches.

Pare Pare is about 150 km south of Mamuju in west Sulawesi, which had been the hunt's main focus since Monday when Indonesian ships detected large metal objects on the sea bed.

RELIEF In a Makassar hotel where relatives of the Adam Air passengers have been staying, Rosmala Dewi, the mother of a flight attendant on the plane, told reporters: ''I feel a bit relieved if it is true that the search team has found that piece. We have waited so long, and we have received so many confusing reports. We do not know whether to go home or stay here forever.'' ''I cannot hide the fact relatives feel happy with this news, we have waited anxiously for too long,'' said Fanny Duran, 46, whose sister, brother-in-law and their child were on the plane.

''As human beings we have lost hope after 10 days but if god wants a miracle to happen it will happen, including the existence of survivors,'' he told Reuters.

The plane vanished less than three days after a ferry with more than 600 aboard capsized and sank off Java but survivors of that accident were still being found nine days later.

At the site further north where metal objects were detected, a US navy oceanographic ship, the USNS Mary Sears, was helping in the search but had yet to shed light on whether the objects were wreckage.

''Up until now I have not received any reports from Mary Sears,'' Suyanto said.

Reuters SP RS1156