Kuala Lumpur: The "most probable area" for search of the missing AirAsia flight has been demarcated, Royal Malaysian Navy Chief Abdul Aziz Jaafar said on Friday.
He said the search area was established with a dimension of 1,575 sq nautical miles, Xinhua cited from a tweet by the navy chief.
"This is most likely the area of the missing plane," he added, posting an image mapping out the search area.
He said three ships were tasked to search there and the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency had assigned diving teams to carry out diving and underwater search.
Meanwhile, relatives held the first funeral for a victim of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 on Thursday as bad weather hampered efforts to locate the wreckage of the plane which crashed in the sea off Borneo with 162 aboard.
The first funeral took place this afternoon after one of the bodies was formally identified as a woman named Hayati Lutfiah Hami, and was handed over to her family in Indonesia's second city of Surabaya.
After prayers at her home, the coffin was taken for burial at a Muslim cemetery nearby, with more than a hundred neighbours in attendance. "I am grateful to God that my sister-in-law was found and I hope the rescuers find the others as soon as possible," Agung Wahyu Darmono, 38, said.
Police said they were still working on formal identification of one young man.
Nine bodies have so far been retrieved in the search for the Airbus A320-200, which disappeared from radar during a storm Sunday en route from Surabaya to Singapore. Search officials said the return of rough weather was hindering efforts to locate the plane and the rest of the bodies.
"The problem we faced today is unfriendly weather conditions," search and rescue agency chief Bambang Soelistyo told a press conference. "The waves were between three and four metres."
A crisis centre for identifying the victims has been set up at a hospital in Surabaya with facilities to store 150 bodies.
Of the 162 passengers and crew on board Flight QZ8501, 155 were Indonesian, with three South Koreans, one Singaporean, one Malaysian, one Briton and a Frenchman -- co-pilot Remi Plesel.
The plane was operated by AirAsia Indonesia, a unit of Malaysia-based AirAsia, which previously had a solid safety record.
With Agency inputs
