First body from crashed AirAsia plane victims identified

Experts have identified one of the two bodies fished out from the Java Sea site where the AirAsia plane went down with 162 on board Sunday, saying Thursday they would hand it over to her family soon.

Budiono, head of the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI), said that one of the two bodies was successfully identified to be an Indonesian woman named Hayati Lutfiah Hamid from East Java province, Xinhua reported.

"The body will be handed over to the family soon today (Thursday)," he said at the Police Hospital Bhayangkara in the Indonesian city of Surabaya from where the ill-fated AirAsia flight QZ8501 took off for Singapore early Sunday morning and crashed 42 minutes later in the Java Sea.

According to one of Hayati's relatives, the funeral will be carried out in Surabaya city soon after the body is handed over Thursday.

He added that the identification work on four other bodies that were brought to the hospital Thursday was going on.

Those bodies were sent to Surabaya by Indonesian military cargo plane for further post-mortem identification before being delivered to families.

Experts for identification have also come from South Korea and Singapore to assist in the work, according police chief of East Java province, Anas Yunus.