Wreckage of Indonesian plane spotted that went missing on Sunday

So far only part of the wing has been found. What happened to the 239 people on that flight remains a mystery.

During the flight, the plane lost contact with Oksibil airport, though it is not thought a distress call was made.

“They were carrying those bags (of cash) to be handed out to poor people in Oksibil through a post office there”, Haryono said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether that aspect of the search would continue in the bad weather.

Also on the plane was 6.5 billion rupiah (USD 470,000) in cash, which were social assistance funds being transported for distribution to poor families, according to the head of the Jayapura post office.

The reported sighting of the wreckage came after the search and rescue agency, Badan SAR Nasional (BASARNAS), resumed the search Monday morning local time, after it had been suspended for the night.

Hours after the plane’s disappearance, villagers in eastern Indonesia’s Papua region claimed to have found the wreckage, the transport ministry’s director-general of air transportation, Suprasetyo, who goes by one name, said.

The ATR42-300 twin turboprop plane was carrying 49 passengers and five crew members on the scheduled 42-minute journey, Barata said.

Villagers had earlier told officials that a plane had crashed into a mountain. A search plane was forced to turn back on Sunday because of risky flying conditions.

It is just the latest air accident in Indonesia, which has a patchy aviation safety record and has suffered major incidents recently, including the crash of an AirAsia plane in December with the loss of 162 lives.

“If the finding result is correct and confirmed, the search and evacuation base would be centered at the Jayapura air base”, Soelistyo said in a statement released on Monday.

Trigana has been on the European Union’s list of banned carriers since 2007 due to safety or regulatory concerns. According to Aviation Safety Network, Trigana Air has encountered 14 serious incidents since it started.

Trigana Air operations director Beni Sumaryanto said within 30 minutes of hearing that the aircraft was missing, the airline sent another plane to scour the same flight path, but it had found nothing because of bad weather.

In June, at least 141 people were killed after an Indonesian Air Force C-130 plane crashed into a residential area in Medan, North Sumatra and burst into flames.