Submarine begins search for Airbus black box

A French nuclear submarine with advanced sonar equipment began searching yesterday for the flight recorders of an Air France airliner that crashed into the Atlantic last week, the French military said.

The Emeraude was sent to the area to hunt the "black box" recorders, which may help explain the disaster and which are believed to lie on the ocean floor.

Investigators face a long search for clues to what went wrong when the Airbus A330 jet disappeared on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris killing all 228 people on board, French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said. "Up to now, the time frame for the search for victims and debris has been of the order of days or a week. Here, at the very least, it's going to be of the order of weeks or months," he told LCI television.

The Air France flight is believed to have run into trouble when it hit a violent storm midway over the Atlantic Ocean and potential problems with speed sensors have become one of the focal points of the inquiry. Other causes have not been ruled out, but France's interior ministry said yesterday that two passengers whose names had been identified as suspicious turned out not to be a concern. The website of the French weekly L'Express had quoted a French military spokes-man as saying the names could be linked to Islamic terrorism.

Brazilian military search teams using planes and ships have recovered 41 bodies and moved 16 of them to the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha off Brazil's northeastern coast, which is being used as a base for the search operations.

Planes looking for bodies and debris have expanded their search to air space controlled by Senegal due to ocean currents in that direction, Brazil's air force said yesterday.

France has sent about 400 military personnel, three planes, one frigate with a helicopter, and a research vessel with mini-submarines as well as the nuclear submarine.