Every victim of an air crash in north China will get 211,000 yuan (about US$25,000) of compensation from the airline, the operation company said Saturday.

 

The flight operator China Eastern Airlines said taking into account of the change of the consumer price index, it will double the law-set compensation standards for passenger death to 140,000 yuan (about US$17,000) and luggage losses to 2,000 or 4,000 yuan respectively.

 

The rest part of the compensation will be the solatium, said the company.

 

Last Sunday, a 50-seat short-haul jet CRJ-200, with 47 passengers and six crew members aboard, left Baotou in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region for east China metropolis Shanghai at 8:21 a.m., but crashed into the lake of Nanhai Park in Baotou City shortly after it took off.

 

Black boxes decoded, cause still unclear

 

Experts have decoded the contents of the recorders, known as "black box," of a crashed passenger aircraft, but the cause of the accident is still unclear, said Xu Li, spokesman for a State Council investigation team, Saturday.

 

The recorders, which were found on the crash site on Nov. 24, were immediately sent to Beijing for decoding. Experts from China, the United States and Canada are now studying the data and information acquired from the "black box."

 

A Canadian-made Bombardier CRJ200 crashed into a park lake in the suburb of Baotou in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, one minute after it took off towards the east China metropolis Shanghai, killing 53 people aboard and two on the ground.

 

So far, more than 90 percent of the remains of the plane have been recovered and most parts of it have been badly damaged, according to the experts.

 

Victims' bodies claimed

 

Family members claimed the remaining five victims' bodies of the Nov. 21 air crash in Baotou, said an official with the investigation team.

 

The official said all 55 bodies have been claimed by their family members. The corpuses were identified by DNA testing.

 

The investigation team will try to fulfill the requirements raised by family on beautification of the remains before cremation.

 

Body cremated

 

The body of Chen Suyang, a victim of the air crash six days ago, was cremated Saturday morning in the funeral home in Baotou.

 

It's the first body of victims being cremated, said an official with the funeral home. Chen was an employee of the Shanghai Fudan Fuhua Scientific and Technological Shareholding Company. Before the cremation, people paid their last respects to the remains of the deceased.

 

Bodies of other victims will be cremated subsequently after body recognition by their relatives.

 

The 50-seat branch-line jet CRJ-200, with 47 passengers and six crew members aboard crashed into a giant lake of Nanhai Park in Baotou on November 21, killing all people on board and another two persons on ground.

 

(Xinhua News Agency November 28, 2004)