The cockpit voice recorder from the crashed Egyptair flight MS804 has been located, recovered by search teams who removed the black box 'in stages', as it was damaged, the Egyptian investigation committee has said.
A specialist vessel MV John Lethbridge owned by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, and previously working the Irish sea oilfields, was diverted and rapidly steamed to the search/recovery zone and had been able to recover the cylindrical memory disk stack from the Airbus cockpit voice recorder.
“The vessel’s equipment was able to salvage the part that contains the memory unit, which is considered the most important part of the recording device,” the statement said.
Egypt’s public prosecutor then ordered the recovered device, one of two 'black boxes' on Airbus, be immediately transferred to the Egyptian investigating team in Alexandra for decoding and analysis.
The unit transferred from the John Lethbridge ship to the coastal city of Alexandria where representatives from the public prosecution and investigators received it, the statement said.
The announcement comes a day after the committee said the MV John Lethbridge, which was contracted by the Egyption government to join the search for the plane debris and flight recorders, had spotted and obtained images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane.
The crash killed all 66 passengers and crew. These included 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Canadians, two Iraqis and people from Belgium, UK (Wales) , Algeria, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Portugal.
No group has so far claimed the crash as a terror attack. Egypt’s aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, told an earlier news conference he didn't want to draw any conclusions prematurely, but “the possibility of having a different action or a terror attack, is higher than the possibility of a technical failure”.
Sources: AP, AFP, CNS, Guardian, BBC,
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