143 Bodies Recovered From Persian Gulf

Aug. 23 -- Searchers have recovered the bodies all 143 people, many of them children, who were aboard the Gulf Air Airbus A320 that crashed today in the Persian Gulf.

Confirming the grim death toll, Ibrahim Abdullah al-Hammar, Bahrain’s Transport Ministry Undersecretary for Civil Aviation also said search and rescue workers had recovered the flight data recorder, or black box, from the passenger jet.

“Yes, we have found the black box and the search for theother box which records conversations in the cockpit is stillgoing on,” Hammar told a news conference atBahrain International Airport.

Gulf Air Flight 72 took off from Cairo, Egypt, en route to Manama, Bahrain’s capital.

Bahraini state television and a newspaper said the aircraft made two approaches to the airport before crashing into the sea. Unconfirmed reports said there was an engine fire, but an air traffic controller and witnesses said they saw no evidence of such a fire.

There were 135 passengers and eight crew members on board, Gulf Air and other local sources said.

One-third of the passengers on board were under 18. There were 26 children under the age of 10, and 18 were under the age of 5.

A Gulf Air official said the passengers included 63 Egyptians, 34 Bahrainis, 12 Saudi Arabians, nine Palestinians, six UAE nationals, one Kuwaiti andone Omani.

Most of the Egyptians were teachers and their families, returning the Bahrain at the end of the school holidays.

There were two British passengers, one Australian and oneCanadian, as well as three Chinese people, one Sudanese and oneKorean.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said there was one American on the plane.

A State Department official told ABCNEWS.com that Bahraini officials had informed the U.S. Embassy that they had a boarding pass that shows a U.S. diplomatic courier on board the flight.

The official had no further details on the identity of thecourier, but said all U.S. diplomatic couriers had to be U.S.citizens.

Gulf Air said that of the aircraft’s eight crew members, the captain was Bahraini and the co-pilot was from Oman. The male cabin attendant was Bahraini and five female attendants came from the Philippines, Poland, India, Morocco and Egypt.