Fourteen dead in Indonesia plane wreck

An Indonesian search team pulled 14 bodies on Saturday from the wreckage of a military plane that crashed in a dense forest with 18 people on board, including three foreigners, an air force official said.

The plane, which was flying from Jakarta to Bogor in West Java, went missing on Thursday. It had 12 military personnel and six civilians on board, including a Briton, a Singaporean and an Indian.

A small air force plane spotted the wreckage late on Friday but could not get closer because of bad weather.

An air force spokesman, Chaerudin Ray, said the search and rescue team reached the site on Saturday morning after a steep climb up a heavily forested mountain.

"They (rescuers) are at the location of the plane's wreckage plane and have put 14 bodies into body bags," Ray told Reuters.

"But it is still difficult to remove them from the valley because of the steepness," he said. "The rescue team is searching for any possible survivor at the site, but looking at the wreckage it seems less possible."

Ray had earlier said the plane had set out to test a digital mapping camera. Indonesian air carriers have been hit by several crashes and safety incidents in recent years, and the country's airlines are currently banned by the European Union.