225 die in China Airlines crash

Search teams recovered more than 100 bodies from the sea last night after a China Airlines Boeing 747-200 with 225 passengers crashed into the Taiwan Strait on a flight from Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, to Hong Kong. A rescue chief said there was little hope of finding survivors.

Flight CI611 was reported missing 20 minutes after takeoff, after it disappeared from radar screens near the Penghu islands, off Taiwan's western coast. As night fell, naval ships with searchlights joined military aircraft and coastguards as they continued the search for survivors from the 22-year-old jet. Most of the passengers were Taiwanese, but the passenger list also included one Singaporean, five people from Hong Kong and a Swiss citizen.

Taiwan's vice minister for ransport, Chang Chia-juch, said life jackets, the plane's cabin door and other pieces of wreckage had been recovered. A large oil slick had been discovered 22 miles north-west of Penghu.

No distress signals came from the airliner, but a Taiwanese television station showed farmers in the western coastal county of Changhua, about 47 miles from the crash site, recovering scraps of foam padding and inflight magazines picturing China Airlines' red flower logo, prompting speculation about a mid-air explosion. Many witnesses reported hearing a large bang, although Mr Chang later ruled out the possibility of a mid-air explosion.

A series of crashes in the 1990s gained China Airlines a reputation as one of the world's most dangerous airlines, and led to a recent push to improve safety. But the aircraft in yesterday's crash was one of the oldest in the fleet and had logged almost 65,000 flight hours.