Indonesia's Search and Rescue (SAR) mission Coordinator Air Commodore Eddy Suyanto said efforts to find the wreckage of the Adam Air plane that went missing during a flight from Java to North Sulawesi on January 1 had been stopped because the plane's black box had been located.

"The search operations for Adam Air plane have been stopped and the joint SAR team has been withdrawn because the black box had been located," Antara news agency on January 27 quoted Eddy as saying at a press conference in Makassar, capital of South Sulawesi province.

Eddy said, the government and the management of Adam Air would take further necessary measures in recovering the black box.

He said it is impossible to evacuate the plane's passengers and crew because no dead bodies were found.

"There are no survivors, merely pieces of hair," Eddy, who is also commander of the airbase said on January 26.

He further said that actually his party already knew that an U.S. ship Mary Sears had caught signals from the plane's black box in Majene waters, West Sulawesi on January 22, but he did not tell about it due to incomplete data.

The ship's Towed Pinger Locator (TPL) 40 and side scan sonar is used to followed up on the findings of the Indonesian warships KRI Fatahillah and KRI Nala, had detected a flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder and metal fragments believed to belong to the ill-fated jetliner.

The plane carried 96 passengers and six crew members on board.

Eddy said the flight data recorder was located in Majene waters in a depth of 2,000 meters in the ocean, while the cockpit voice recorder at the coordinate points in a depth of 1,900 meters in the sea.

Meanwhile Joseph Tumenggung, an investigator of the National Committee for Transportation Safety said that his office would try to recover the black box.