sia, the country`s flagship airline, said the search for the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, the so-called black boxes, of the Airbus A300-B4 which crashed on Friday would be resumed at dawn. The recorders will be crucial in determining the cause of the crash, and whether the haze from forest fires on Sumatra played a part. An air force official earlier said the remains of the 222 passengers and 12 crew had been removed from the wreckage, which is strewn across a deep ravine crossing a hillside banana and palm plantation 45 km (30 miles) south of the city of Medan. The Garuda plane had been on a flight from Jakarta to Medan when it went down minutes after the pilot reported low visibility because of a smoky haze. Garuda officials said 74 of the bodies had been identified and 55 of them had been flown to Jakarta. All unidentified bodies would be given a mass burial on Monday, alongside another mass grave containing 62 people who died in a plane crash in 1979, they said. Rescue workers battled through slush and tangled undergrowth to bring the bodies out of the ravine and to the road leading to Medan. Bush fires mainly in Sumatra and Kalimantan on the Indonesian portion of Borneo Island have sent a choking, health-threatening smog over neighbouring Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei and as far as Thailand and the Philippines in what experts have called a major environmental disaster. The smog will be one of the factors examined in an inquiry into the crash, but other Garuda pilots expressed scepticism that the haze would have been a prime cause. The veteran pilot of the Airbus told the Medan control tower he was flying through smoky haze on his approach to the city`s Polonia international airport, Antara had reported. Another pilot said the plane had left its flight path and was flying too low.

Transport Minister Haryanto Dhanitirto was quoted by Antara as saying: "Whether the plane flew low because of the pilot, or because of instructions from air traffic control, or because of engine trouble - all are still being investigated. That will be looked at by the independent investigation team." The news agency quoted a member of the forensic team at Adam Malik hospital as saying there were two "strange" corpses, and suggested they might have been stowaways or people killed on the ground.