MAKASSAR, Indonesia (Reuters) - Part of the tail of an Indonesian plane that disappeared with 102 people on board 10 days ago has been found in the sea off Sulawesi island, an air base commander said on Thursday.
Police said later that search teams had found a woman's body floating in the same general area.
The ill-fated Adam Air Boeing 737-400 was heading from Surabaya in Central Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather on January 1.
"This morning I announced that there has been a finding of a part of Adam Air. What was found was the right tail's stabiliser number 65C25746-76. This thing was found by a fisherman in Pare Pare," said Eddy Suyanto, who has been co-ordinating search efforts from an air base in the South Sulawesi capital, Makassar.
"This object has the same number as the Boeing catalogue," he told reporters, displaying the slightly scratched white stabiliser found on Wednesday.
A police official told Reuters that a female body had been recovered from the sea.
"She had short black hair. She wore green attire, long brown trousers. She had typical dark Asian skin," police official Simon Benteng said by telephone from Pare Pare, a seaside town about 100 km (60 miles) north of Makassar.
He estimated that the woman was in her 30s and said neither her identity nor whether she was a passenger on the Adam Air plane had been confirmed
Pare Pare is about 150 km (90 miles) south of Mamuju in west Sulawesi, the main focus of the hunt since Monday when Indonesian ships detected large metal objects deep on the sea bed.
A U.S. navy oceanographic ship, the USNS Mary Sears, joined the search effort earlier but has yet to shed light on whether the metal objects are wreckage.
"Up until now I have not received any reports from Mary Sears," Suyanto said.
Moekhlas Sidik, commander of the navy's eastern fleet, had said on Wednesday the Mary Sears confirmed the findings of metal objects at three points and was focussing on one of the sites.
The objects lay at a depth of 1,700 metres (5,600 feet) and, while the U.S. vessel could map the sea bed, the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office said it had its limits.
"In shallow water that's not too difficult to do, in less than 500 metres. Any deeper ... and it will be very difficult for our ship to identify any parts, especially if they're small," Mark Jarrett, deputy director of operations for the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office, told Reuters in Washington.
(Additional reporting by Mita Valina Liem in Jakarta)
