hankyoreh

The search for 22 people, including 13 South Koreans, aboard a missing Cambodian plane resumed Tuesday afternoon as the weather started to clear up, but no traces of the jet or any survivors have yet been found, a South Korean foreign ministry official said.

The rescue operations resumed early Tuesday, but bad weather conditions hampered efforts throughout the morning, according to the official.

"Cambodia resumed the operations at 2:20 p.m., Seoul time, using helicopters and deploying a total of 1,200 soldiers, including 200 personal bodyguards of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen from a special combat unit," the ministry official told reporters.

The passenger plane, a PMT Air flight carrying 22 people, including three Czech tourists and six Cambodian crew members, went missing early Monday shortly after its departure from Cambodia's Siem Reap, home of the famous Angkor Wat temple, en route to the Southeast Asian country's coastal city of Sihanoukville.

The turbo-prop AN-24 aircraft is believed to have crashed and everyone aboard feared dead. Earlier reports said the airline has recorded at least three major accidents or in-flight emergencies in the past two years.

Still, no traces of a crash have been found, leaving some hope that the aircraft may have managed to crash land in the jungle.

Raising hopes, rescue workers said they have received dial tones from two mobile phones registered to two South Korean tourists on the ill-fated plane. No one answered, yet the fact that the phones are intact and able to receive signals may be an indication that the plane did not explode in the air, which is a positive sign.

Based on the phone signals, rescue efforts have been expanded to cover four new sectors that were not checked before.

"The rescue team is looking at all possibilities, including the chance that the plane made an emergency landing and that there could be survivors, as local villagers said there was no explosion or fire at the crash," Shin Hyun-suk, South Korea's ambassador to Cambodia, said.

The diplomat was dispatched Monday to Cambodia's Kampot Province, where the plane is believed to have crashed.

He will be joined by nine other officials, including two forensic experts from South Korea's National Institute of Scientific Investigation and 16 family members of the missing South Koreans later Tuesday, according to foreign ministry officials.

The search is being aided by U.S. satellites at the request of both the Seoul and Phnom Penh governments, but satellite images over the presumed accident sites have been "indecipherable" due to heavy clouds over the area, according to the ministry official.

Earlier reports said that four bodies along with some debris of a crashed jet had been found, but the ministry official said the reports were false.

Meanwhile, the Cambodian prime minister has told the South Korean ambassador there that he will stay at his government's emergency rescue center in Kampot Province "for some time to personally direct the rescue operations," the official said.
SEOUL, June 26 (Yonhap News)