Manila: Philippine officials say divers have recovered the bodies of two pilots from a plane that crashed in the sea over the weekend and killed the country's popular interior secretary, ending a massive search.
Defence Secretary Voltaire Gazmin says the Filipino pilot, Captain Jessup Bahinting, was retrieved from the wreckage of the four-seat Piper Seneca plane on the sea floor off central Masbate province on Wednesday.
His Nepalese co-pilot, Kshitiz Chand, was found floating on Thursday.
Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo's body was retrieved on Tuesday in a US Navy-backed search supervised by President Benigno Aquino III. Robredo's police aide managed to swim out of the doomed plane and survived.
With a stalled engine, the plane crashed at sea while attempting to land on Saturday at the Masbate airport. The wreckage was brought ashore on Thursday.
PTI
First Published: Thursday, August 23, 2012, 10:45