Eight more bodies of the passengers on the crashed Air France Flight 447 have been found, raising the total number of the recovered bodies to 24, the Brazilian military said on Monday.

The bodies were found in an area some 440 km northeast of the Sao Pedro and Sao Paulo Islands where the water depth reaches 3,500 meters.

The military also recovered a large tail section from the jetliner, an Airbus A330, helping narrow the hunt for "black boxes" that could reveal the cause of the disaster.

According to Lieutenant Colonel Henry Munhoz, spokesman for the Air Force, the recovered bodies and wreckage were being taken first to a military staging area at the Fernando de Noronha islands, and then to the northeastern coastal city of Recife for identification.

Right now, finding the bodies of the plane's 228 occupants was the top priority of the search crew, the spokesman said.


Brazilian Navy spokesman Gilcemar Tabosa (L) and Brazilian Air Force officer Henry Nunhoz show a picture of a piece of debris from Air France flight AF447 retrieved by Brazilian sailors, during a press conference in Recife, Brazil, June 8, 2009. (Xinhua/Brazil News Agency)

At least eight bodies were found Monday after rescue teams hauled up 14 corpses on Sunday and two on Saturday, along with personal items and pieces from the plane.

Officials said they would no longer disclose the genders of the bodies found because in some cases that was impossible to immediately verify.

As of late Sunday, four men and four women were said to be among the bodies collected.


A handout picture from the Brazilian Air Force shows Brazilian Navy divers recovering a huge part of the rudder of the Air France Airbus A330 out of the Atlantic Ocean, some 745 miles (1,200 km) northeast of Recife. (Xinhua/Brazilian Air Force/Handout)

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pledged that the Brazilian military would do all it could to recover bodies for grieving families.

"During this painful time it's not going to resolve the problem, but it is an immense comfort to know they can bury their loved ones," he said on his national radio program on Monday.

A total of 255 soldiers from the Brazilian Air Force and 570 from the Navy have participated in the search work. Some 14 Brazilian and French aircrafts and five ships were also involved in the operation.

The French agency investigating the crash of Flight 447 said on Saturday that signals from the missing Air France jetliner suggested that its autopilot was not on before it vanished.

Paul-Louis Arslanian, the director of France's air safety investigation agency, said at a press conference in Paris that some problems had been detected with the speed-measuring instruments on the Airbus A330. "They hadn't yet been replaced" on the plane that crashed, he added.

Air France said it began replacing the Pitot tubes on the Airbus A330 model on April 27 after an improved version became available, and would finish the work in the coming weeks. The monitors had not yet been replaced on the plane that crashed.

The Air France Airbus A330 with 228 people on board vanished over the Atlantic Ocean last Monday after leaving Rio de Janeiro for Paris. Experts are still trying to understand the cause of the crash as French and Brazilian teams scour deep Atlantic waters for its black box voice and data recorders.

Source: Xinhua