KABUL, Feb 22 (AFP) - Forty-six bodies have been recovered about two and a half weeks after an Afghan plane crashed into a mountain near Kabul killing all 104 people on board, officials said Tuesday.
"To date we have found 46 intact bodies and some human remains and carried them from the crash site," said General Mohammed Zahir Azimi, spokesman for the defence ministry and an international commission investigating the accident.
"Among the recovered bodies, two of them are women, three are children," he said. "We could identify eight of them and we will announce their identity tomorrow."
The rest of the recovered bodies have not been identified. Italian experts are helping out by using DNA tests that are unavailable in Afghanistan, he added.
The Kam Air Boeing 737 was on a domestic flight from the western city of Herat to the capital Kabul when it hit a 3,300-metre (9,900-feet) mountain peak and broke into pieces during a snowstorm on February 3.
Twenty-four of the victims were foreigners.
The recovery operation has been hampered by Afghanistan's coldest winter in a decade, which left the crash site buried under metres of snow.
The first human remains were found by international peacekeepers on February 7 but recovery work did not start for another week because of the weather.
02/22/2005 14:34 GMT - AFP