A Brazilian military official said on Saturday that a search party had found bodies of two men in the Atlantic Ocean close to where an Air France jet is believed to have crashed.

Air force spokesman Col Jorge Amaral said the bodies were recovered on Saturday morning. They were picked up 640 km northeast of the Fernando de Noronha Islands off Brazil’s northern coast. A suitcase also was found containing a plane ticket for the flight.

Flight 447 disappeared on Sunday with 228 people on board. Officials say there were no survivors.

The first item recovered was a seat from the plane, Amaral said. The first body was then sighted by a navy vessel. It was recovered 20 minutes later by the ship’s crew and identified as that of a man, he said. The last item recovered so far was a backpack, he said. The search for more bodies and debris from the plane was continuing in the zone, 1,000 kms off Brazil’s northeast coast. It was the first recovery of items from the aircraft in six days of searching the open Atlantic.

Earlier finds on Thursday had turned out not to be part of the crash, as searchers battled days of terrible weather conditions. Investigators are still trying to work out what caused the tragedy of flight AF 477, which was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

French investigators said on Saturday the Air France Airbus A330 suffered multiple systems failures in its final moments and had speed monitors that had failed on other planes.

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