A rescue team has found three bodies near a crashed US Marine helicopter, Nepal's defence secretary said today.

The wreckage of the missing helicopter had earlier been spotted in the mountains north east of Kathmandu.

Six Marines and two Nepalese army soldiers were on board when it went missing on Tuesday while delivering aid in the Himalayan nation following a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on April 25.

Army chief of operations Major General Binoj Basnyat said the wreckage was located in the district of Dolakha.

Many areas in that region of Nepal are not reachable by air or road.

Nepal's defence secretary Iswori Poudyal gave no details about the nationalities of the victims.

The discovery of the wreckage, first spotted by a Nepalese army helicopter today, followed days of intense search involving US and Nepalese aircraft and even US satellites.

The US relief mission was deployed soon after the initial quake, which killed more than 8,200 people. It was followed by another magnitude-7.3 quake on Tuesday that killed 117 people and injured 2,800.

The second quake was centred between Kathmandu and Mount Everest, and hit hardest in deeply rural parts of the Himalayan foothills, hammering many villages reached only by hiking trails and causing road-blocking landslides.

The US Marines said they were sending their own rescue team to assess the wreckage and determine if it was the missing helicopter, the UH-1 Huey.